When Adam Bales, took a seat at the bar and ordered a vodka gimlet, the bartender looked at him as if he had asked for road directions to Mars.
They were in Perkins, Colorado-an obscure mining town of about one thousand souls, tucked away from main highways, railroads and air routes, in the Rocky Mountains-and Adam Bales was a day laborer on a construction crew. Nobody ever ordered a gimlet in Mike Sandor's bar and none of the guys on the Ridgeway Road project drank anything except straight whiskey and beer.
Mike assumed the big, broad-shouldered man was a construction worker because he had walked in at about ten minutes past four with several other workmen whom Mike knew, and he was dressed as they were-khaki pants, a t-shirt that had once been white but now almost matched the color of his trousers, and a hard hat pushed back to show his wavy straw-colored hair. Mike guessed the big man was new on the job because he had never been in the place before.
"What was that again, bud?" Mike Sandor asked.
Adam remembered where he was and said, "Never mind. Make it beer-Coors."
The bartender grinned, his world serene again, and reached for an ice-cold bottle.
It was funny, Adam told himself. Regardless of how sick he had become of his way of life the last year, and how glad he was to have broken away, bits of it still clung to him-habits like having a gimlet in the afternoon. He had never even tried one until she persuaded him that gimlets were good. Pretty soon he had gotten to like them. Now it was habit.
Other things clung, too-conditioned responses, memories.
Another funny thing, he thought, as he lifted the glass of beer to his lips, was the way a person's memory worked. Regardless of how unpleasant an experience might have been over-all, people usually remembered the good parts of it while the rest-even if the bad amounted to ninety per cent of the total-faded and blurred.
Memories.
There was one memory in particular that Adam couldn't get out of his mind regardless of how hard he tried. It kept popping up when he was at work, or at times like this, or at night when he lay in bed smoking the day's last cigarette.
The memory of Gloria's breasts.
In the seven years since he had left home at the age of eighteen, Adam Bales had squeezed and fondled breasts all the way from Boston to San Diego-big ones, small ones, firm ones and soft ones. Breasts with all sorts of nipples-some tiny and hard, others large and yielding, red ones, pink ones, brown ones and all shades in between.
Never, in all his experience, had he known another pair of breasts as perfect as Gloria's.
This wasn't Adam's opinion alone. In Hollywood, Gloria Trent was known among the wise boys as the pair of knockers that think they can act.
Regardless of her acting ability, or lack of it, Gloria's other physical attributes were not mediocre. In fact, she had altogether the best figure that Adam had ever seen. But present-day standards being what they were, it was her bust that had recommended motion picture stardom for Gloria Trent.
Her breasts had more than recommended it; they had practically impelled it. From the moment an obscure assistant director from Melwyn Studios had glimpsed them beside a hotel pool at Palm Springs, the course of Gloria Trent's career was inevitable. Or, at least, so it had seemed.
When she had told Adam about how she was "discovered," she had laughed in a wistful way as if it were an ironic joke. Though Gloria was proud of her body, the human being within hungered for appreciation, as a person and professionally as an actress, rather than merely as the chance possessor of a great set of knockers. That hunger, never satisfied, was the cause of many of her troubles ... and of his.
Adam learned this shortly after they were married.
Another thing he learned about Gloria was that she was afraid of time, because she knew that time would inevitably rob her of her beauty. And beauty was all she had. Facelifts, "dips", and the other tricks which Hollywood women used, could do no more than slow up the process; they couldn't stop it. And the day would eventually come when Gloria Trent would no longer be the universal symbol of feminine sex appeal.
Then she would no longer be wanted.
She would be nothing.
That was the fear that haunted her, as Adam knew so well, and that was part of the reason she had run off to Acapulco with Gary Lankford-as if time didn't pass in Mexico as everywhere else, and as if the minutes didn't continue to tick away regardless of whose bed she shared.
Adam finished his beer, waved a goodnight to the men who had accompanied him to the bar, and walked down the main street of Perkins and around the corner to the rooming house where he lived.
This seemed to be an evening for dredging up the past, he decided. It had been two weeks since he had left Hollywood and he had been telling himself that he'd made good progress in getting Gloria and their life together out of his system. Now, suddenly, all of it seemed to be flooding back.
It wasn't her affair with Lankford which had made Adam walk out. Lankford had not been the first she had played house with during the year of their marriage. The Lankford incident had merely served to activate a decision which Adam had made long before. Almost from the beginning, he had realized that the marriage was doomed.
But it had been sweet at times-sweet as a drop of honey on the tongue.
In spite of himself, Adam now found his memory carrying him back to the start of it.
It had been a hot summer day, very much like the one that was then drawing to a close, except that he had been working in California with a road crew in the great Russian River country north of San Francisco. They had been building a bridge on Highway 101.
What had happened had been a one-in-a-million twist of fate that would have seemed impossible had anyone dared to predict it. And it would never have occurred had the circumstances leading up to it been different in even the slightest degree. Nor, Adam was sure, would it have occurred with anyone other than Gloria. Another woman of equal fame and position would have taken one look at the bare-chested, sweaty man in whose arms she happened to awaken and would have dismissed him with an impersonal expression of gratitude and perhaps the offer of a check for his trouble.
She wouldn't have offered him herself-the body that made millions of men hot with desire when they saw it on the screen.
But Gloria did.
She offered him everything.
Who, in Adam Bales' shoes, would have turned the offer down?
On that day, the demolition of the old bridge was about half completed. There were barricades across the road some distance back with arrows indicating the detour that wound along the side of the shallow canyon. Warning signs had been posted for about a quarter of a mile up the highway.
But the driver of the convertible Caddy apparently had not seen them or else just didn't give a damn.
Adam, stripped to the waist, was at the side of the road behind the line of barricades, helping two other men load chunks of rock and debris on a truck. It was hot, and sweat was steaming off his sun-browned face and torso.
One of the other guys, Joe Dickens, saw the approaching Cad before Adam did. Joe, standing on the truck, suddenly straightened up and squinted down the road. "Hey, this one don't look like it's gonna turn off," he said anxiously. His face grew tense. "Damn it, it ain't!"
Joe leaped off the truck and scurried around it toward the down-slope beside the road. After taking one look at the approaching car, Adam followed him, as did the other man, Slim Whitehouse. The Caddy-a white job, its chrome and windows gleaming in the bright sun-was hurtling straight for the barricades at what must have been at least sixty miles an hour. It was obviously too close and moving too fast to make the detour turn-off.
"Son of a bitch!" Slim Whitehouse said, then belly whopped in the dirt. Adam landed beside him. Joe Dickens was a couple of paces ahead.
All three of them were wallowing in dust, out of sight of the road surface, when they heard the Caddy hit the barricades. Its tires squealed piteously as the driver finally applied the brakes. The squealing was accompanied by the splintering of wood and the chugging, snapping sounds of the wheels passing over loose rocks, boards, and other debris. Then there was a harsh rasping, several creaks from the car's body and springs, and a low-pitched scraping which ended in a muffled thud. And silence.
Adam lurched to his feet on the steep side-bank of the road and struggled toward the top of it. Dust billowed around him, sticking to his sweating face and torso. When he reached the top of the roadbed, his breath was heaving in and out in great gasps.
He saw the car about eighty feet away. It had smashed a course through the barricades, thundered over the rock and rubble beyond the end of the pavement, and climbed halfway up a pile of dirt. Had the driver not had the presence of mind to pull the wheel in that direction, the car would have taken a header into the canyon.
The Cadillac was slanting toward its left side as if it had been about to nose over. The driver's door was hanging open and jazz blared from the car's radio. The engine was dead. From where he stood, Adam could see no one in the car. He looked around, thinking that perhaps the driver and the other occupants, if any, had been thrown out. But there was no one to be seen.
He ran towards the dirt pile and began fighting his way up to the car. From behind him, Joe Dickens yelled something but Adam didn't catch it. Across the canyon workmen -lined the edge and stood on what remained of the old bridge abutment, craning their necks.
When Adam reached the side of the Caddy, he saw her.
She was lying on her side across the front seat, apparently unconscious. The only blood in evidence was from a tiny scratch on her left cheek. She was wildly beautiful-young, blonde, and with a figure like none Adam had ever seen before. Her sleeveless white dress had pulled high on her legs and the legs were positioned as if she were riding a bicycle. She had delectable golden thighs. They gleamed nakedly above the tops of her sheer hose. The first two buttons had popped from the front of her dress, revealing a lush abundance of bosom, held captive by a white brassiere.
Bending forward to take a closer look at her face, Adam noted a slight bruise on her forehead and guessed that she had bumped her head against the steering wheel when the car lurched onto the dirt pile. He felt her throat and found a pulse. It was strong.
Still looking at her face, he suddenly wondered if the excitement had been too much for him. Why, she looked just like....
He backed up slightly and twisted to read the registration card on the Caddy's steering post. She was! Gloria Trent. The girl who stood second only to "the body" as the top box office queen of the country!
Adam was struck dumb for a moment and he stood staring down at her. The sound of Joe and Slim clambering up the hill behind him snapped him out of his daze, and he reached to flip off the blaring radio. Then he turned the ignition key.
Though familiar with the rule about not moving an injured person at the scene of an accident, Adam decided that in this case no harm would be done. It was obvious that the woman was not badly hurt. He carefully worked a hand under her naked thighs, above her stocking tops, and extended the other arm around her back. He slid her toward him along the seat, far enough to enable him to lift her. Her skirt rucked higher and he couldn't help looking down at the front of her white nylon pants.
Their virtual transparency revealed the rather surprising fact that Gloria Trent was a natural blonde.
Now he raised her up in his arms, having to let her skirt remain high for the moment, and lifted her out of the car.
"Holy Toledo!" Joe Dickens exclaimed behind him. "What a body!"
"Yeah," Adam growled.
He shifted the woman's position, getting a firmer hold on her, and brought her against his dirt-smeared naked chest. He was very aware of the yielding smoothness of the thigh he clutched in his left palm. It was a big thigh, but firm and with the texture of satin. Both thighs were bared all the way up, her skirt now lying at her gently sloping belly which was sheathed in white nylon.
"Wow!" Slim Whitehouse breathed as he also gaped at her.
It was then that Gloria Trent moved her head, blinked a couple of times, and looked at Adam. Her eyes were blue as an Arctic lake ... but much warmer. After staring at him for some moments, she smiled. "You can put me down now, Tarzan," she said husk "Are you all right?" he demanded, still holding her.
"I think so," she said, light dancing in her eyes as she looked at the huge, muscular man who held her. Her attitude didn't seem right for a person who had just missed death by inches.
"Was there anybody else in the car?" Adam asked her.
"Mm-mmm." She shook her head, causing her blonde hair to rub against his naked shoulder.
She looked down at her legs and reached for her skirt to try to tug it over them. The hold Adam had on her prevented it.
"You'd better put me down, strong man, so that I can cover up, hm?" She was still half-smiling at him.
"Yeah."
Carefully Adam tilted her so that her feet could reach the slanting surface of the earth pile. She was wearing white high-heeled pumps. She planted them unsteadily and finally gained some footing. He released her and she smoothed her dress down. As she bent slightly forward to do so, she revealed magnificent scenery down the front of her bra.
The girl was fabulously built-there was no doubt about that. When he had seen Gloria Trent on the screen, Adam had wondered if there wasn't some fakery involved, but now he knew better. Nothing about her was artificial, even including the color of her hair. She was all delicious, lush, true-blonde and beautiful ... all 39-23-38 of her. Those were the measurements that he had read somewhere, and now Adam believed them. But mere numbers couldn't describe Gloria Trent's beauty ... nor could words, except perhaps the single word delicious.
"Well?" she said, looking at him interestedly. She had paid no attention to Joe or Slim-only Adam. "If you've ogled me long enough, do you suppose we can get down off this sand pile before I fall on my face?"
"Yeah," Adam said, coming awake again. "Sure." He took her by the arm. Sparks seemed to jump as he touched her.
Easy, boy, he told himself. Don't go getting ideas about this chick. Maybe she gave you a couple of cozy looks and maybe you're a pretty good hunk of man flesh, but she's got her pick of the best. She just gets a kick out of flirting with ordinary Joes, that's all. She likes to see that look in their eyes-the look that says they'd mortgage their whole miserable lives for one hour with her on a bed.
With difficulty they reached the bottom of the dirt pile, Joe and Slim clumping along, stirring up dust beside them. Suddenly Gloria leaned against Adam, her left breast ramming into his naked torso. "I want to talk to you," she whispered. "Right now. Alone."
"Sure," was all he could say. The feel of her breast against him-the turgid thrust of it-had unnerved him. The woman was really built! Most dames with bongos as large as hers were pretty soft up there, he'd found. But not this sex wagon. Her breasts were like a pair of slightly under-inflated kids' balloons.
"You guys wait here," Adam said to Joe and Slim.
They just gaped at him as he led Gloria fifteen or twenty feet away. Then he faced her and asked, "What is it?"
Her blue eyes searched his boldly. "Do you know who I am?"
He nodded, giving her back look for look.
"I don't want anyone else to know," she said. "There would be all sorts of talk." She still had that twinkle in her eyes, but she was very serious.
"Hell, I don't see how you can prevent it. A crowd's going to be here by the time the highway patrol and a wrecking truck show up. And the cops will question you. The boys on the other side of the canyon have probably already put in a call from the shack over there."
"Then I can't stay here," she said.
Adam just looked at her.
"Do you think you can get the Caddy started?" she asked him.
"You mean drive it off that pile of earth?" he demanded.
She nodded quickly. The gesture expressed a great amount of latent energy. Adam could see, in just being close to her and talking with her for a few minutes, that Gloria Trent was a highly charged female.
"Hell, I don't know if it would be possible," he said. "The damned engine is probably out of commission, for one thing. And the dirt is pretty soft." He looked at her for a moment. "If you just want to get away, I suppose I could drive you. My car's parked over there." He jerked his head toward an ancient Chevvy clunker.
"No," she said. "That's no good. The car's mine. If I left it, it would be identified right away. Even if I tore off the registration card, all they'd have to do would be to run a check on the license number."
"I don't see how you can keep this quiet, anyway," Adam told her. "The other boys here probably recognized you; at least one of them must have."
She said, "What a couple of road workers say wouldn't carry much weight as long as there's no evidence."
"Even if I could get the Caddy off that dirt heap and running, it would probably be against the law for you to leave until the highway cops get here," Adam said. "It'd be hit and run, wouldn't it?"
"Nonsense!" Gloria snapped. "Nobody was hurt. I just ran off the road, that's all."
Gn thinking it over, Adam guessed she was right. He looked around. Joe and Slim had their heads together, grinning his way and exchanging comments.
Cars had been coming up the highway and turning off at the detour without stopping, but now there was one that hesitated at the detour turn-off, the driver looking at the broken barricades and the Caddy that was nosed up on the pile of dirt.
"We'll have a crowd here pretty soon," Adam said.
"That's why we have to hurry," Gloria told him. She squeezed his bare arm. "This is important to me.
"Okay," he said, the look in her eyes having convinced him. "I'll give it a try."
"I'll wait here," Gloria responded.
Adam dog-trotted back toward the car, passing the other two men and paying no attention to Joe Dickens', "Hey, ain't that the movie star-Gloria what's-her-name ?"
He struggled up the bank to the Caddy, setting off more billows of dust. He slid behind the wheel, closed the door, and twisted the ignition key. The starter turned. He was half-surprised when the motor caught. He told himself, those Caddies sure as hell are rugged machines!
Adam moved the drive selector to reverse and began slowly to feed the Caddy gas. The engine moaned. There was a strange clatter in it, but the power was still there. Dust flew and the car rocked slightly. He knew he would have to go easy or the damned car would flip.
He gave it more gas. The rear end seemed to be burrowing down and by that time there was so much dust flying he couldn't see a thing. But the car was moving-just a little at first, then more.
It tilted precariously to the side as it began to slide and roll down through the loose dirt. The engine coughed and he goosed it harder. It snarled, fish-tailed slightly, then swooped back and down, hitting the solid ground behind the dirt pile with a heavy crack. He wondered if it had broken an axle. But it was still rolling-and with surprising smoothness, too. At that moment, his admiration for Cadillacs was without bounds.
He backed through the rubble, only now able to see where he was going as he left the dust hanging in front of him like an atomic cloud.
Adam eased the car through the remains of the broken barricades and whipped it around, making Joe and Slim jump out of the way.
Gloria was running, in the mincing way of a woman in spike heels, toward the right-hand side of the car, the flesh above the vee of her brassiere quivering and the bra's lavish contents tossing from side to side. Two cars had stopped a short distance away and several people were standing there looking.
Gloria opened the right-hand door and slid onto the seat, her tight skirt careening up her thighs. "Good!" she breathed as she slammed the door. "Now gun this bastard out of here!"
"What?" Adam demanded, hunched over the wheel, the car idling.
"Do it!" she snapped. "Come on!"
He took three seconds to think about his job, and then he looked at the leggy, breasty, lush-blonde woman beside him.
He gunned it. The Caddy roared and loose rocks flew from its wheels as they swept past the gawking bystanders and down the open reach of Highway 101.
TWO
Gloria lay back against the seat, letting the wind whip and tear at her blonde curls. She looked across at Adam. "God, man, you're a driver!"
He threw her a grin and almost got his gaze caught in her brassiere before he swung it back to the road. The top of her dress was still open, the buttons gone, and it flapped revealingly in the wind.
"Level with me, now, will you?" he asked.
"Sure," she said, her cheek resting against the top of the seatback as she continued to look at the bronzed, dirt-smudged giant behind the wheel.
"You weren't drunk and the car was okay. Why the hell did you miss the turn-off back there and almost get yourself killed?"
Gloria laughed.
"Well, why?" Adam repeated sharply. "Because, if you really want to know, I had my eyes closed!"
"What?"
"So help me," she said, still acting as if it was a big joke. "I had a mad-on. I'd just come through a nasty experience." She paused and her tone became more serious. "Maybe I wanted to kill myself, I don't know."
"I'll be damned," Adam said softly.
"But I feel better now," Gloria shot back. "Now the world looks good again."
"One thing more, if you don't mind my asking-just where the hell am I taking you?"
She made an airy motion with her arms. "Any place the spirit moves you."
The remark had barely registered when a highway patrol car, red light flashing, loomed around a curve in front of them. Adam slowed and eased over. The car swept past.
"There they go to investigate your accident," he said. "They're going to be disappointed when they don't find you at the scene."
"Tough luck!" she responded.
Adam stepped up their speed again and looked at her. "You know, I can't decide quite what to make of this-I mean, considering who you are and all." He looked back at the road and she didn't say anything.
When he glanced at her again, she was smiling at him, those damnable flirty eyes of hers sparkling as they had done before.
"Well?" he said a trifle sharply.
"What's your name?" she asked, her lips still curving. In spite of the slight scratch on her cheek and the dust which hadn't entirely blown away, her face was compellingly beautiful. It was a struggle for Adam to keep from gazing at it and to hell with watching the road. He told her his name.
"Well, Mister Adam Bales, you're in the driver's seat!"
He shot her another glance. Man, but she was beautiful-lovelier than she had ever looked on the screen, in spite of the accident and all!
He faced front again. "Maybe I'm not too bright," he said, "but it strikes me that this is a pretty loose conversation. I don't think you really mean what you seem to be saying. Now, let me have it straight out, will you? Where were you coming from when you ran off the road back there? If you had just left somebody, you'd better go back to them or at least give them a call. They'll be worried in case word gets out that Gloria Trent had some trouble."
It was quiet for a few moments, then she said, "Adam ... "
He glanced at her. She was looking at him carefully, serious now but with some of the sparkle still there. She went on: "Where I was, I'd never go again. I said it was a nasty experience. Right now I don't care where I go. Take me wherever you like. Surprise me. Let's raise some kind of hell." Her tone contained a slight hint of desperation.
He blinked at her and could only drop a bewildered laugh. "Miss Trent," he said, "you've just been in a smash-up. You came damn close to getting killed. The front end of the car is probably banged up pretty bad and, if you'll listen to the engine, you'll hear some groans and clatters that General Motors didn't put there. On top of that, you're scratched and dusty and ... hell, look at me ... shirtless, covered with sweat...."
"I've been looking at you," she said, her tone dipping down.
That made Adam turn his head again. The gaze Gloria was giving him was one no motion picture censor would have allowed.
"You don't understand yet," Gloria said slowly, her voice still at bedroom pitch. "So let me spell it out for you: I want you, man. Now you can ask all kinds of questions and quibble and talk it off, or you can take me to a motel right now." She went on blithely, "As far as a little dust is concerned, I hear motels nowadays have showers. As for a shirt, I think I can scrape together enough change to buy you one ... not that you need it. As a matter-of-fact, I've got enough money in my bag to buy out a whole shirt store."
When Adam next looked at her, her eyes were blazing-but not with anger. It was plain, old fashioned lust. He thought he knew the answer: she was a nympho! Gloria Trent was a damned nympho and, after the excitement of what had happened, his naked brawn appealed to her.
Well, what the hell? He'd give her a go. Why not? Imagine ... Gloria Trent, sexpot of the world, offering all her goodies to him! What more could a peon ask?
He eased down on the gas pedal and the Caddy surged, clanking slightly, over the rolling wooded hills. The signboards which began multiplying beside the road told of an approaching town and Adam knew it would have a motel. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to find that motel fast.
He picked the first one they approached. It looked fairly good with two tiers of rooms around a parking area and a large oblong pool at the side. The front of the lobby was all glass. He turned in and stopped the Caddy just past the main office entrance. He looked like hell but, at a time like this, he wasn't going to let appearances stop him. Then he realized he was practically broke. He had only a couple of bucks in his jeans.
When he turned to Gloria she was already snapping shut her white bag. She held a closed fist out to him. He opened his palm and let her press several bills into his hand.
"Sorry I happen to be tapped," he said, then grinned. "You should have given me some advance notice."
"Don't worry about it," she told him. "Put whatever's left over in your pocket. It will cover the shirt and all."
On his way to the office he sneaked a look at the bills and almost stumbled. She had given him a twenty, two fifties and a century. Two hundred and twenty bucks!
Two hundred and twenty bucks for what? he asked himself. Stud service? Gloria Trent didn't have to pay for that! There was hardly a guy in the country-or in the whole cockeyed world, for that matter-who wouldn't have jumped at the chance to bounce her fanny on a mattress, and they certainly wouldn't have expected to be paid for the privilege!
Well, maybe it was just that she didn't want to . make him feel cheap by counting out small bills, Adam thought. Okay, so what's the difference?
He pulled the clear glass door and stepped up to the motel desk, very much aware at that moment that his "chest was bare and dirty and that he wore an old pair of levis low on his hips and heavy construction boots. The desk clerk-about fifty, white-haired, and too prim appearing for a man-pursed his lips as he looked Adam over. He didn't say anything.
"I'd like a room," Adam said. "One day. My wife and myself."
The man hesitated, wet his lips with his tongue, but finally nodded his head. "Nine dollars," he said simply.
Adam laid the twenty on the counter and filled out the card which the man placed before him. He wrote Mr. and Mrs. Albert Brown, San Francisco, and faked the car's license number, which he didn't know anyway.
The clerk made change and handed it to him together with a room key. "That's 18," he said. "First floor in back. Park in front of the door."
"Thanks." Adam turned and walked out.
Gloria didn't say a thing when he returned to the car. As he started it and headed for the rear of the court, he glanced back at the office. The clerk was standing in the doorway giving him and Gloria the once-over. Since the man could see only the back of her head, it wasn't likely he had recognized her, Adam decided.
He parked in front of number 18, pulling the Cad up beside a two-toned Chevvy. Those two cars and one other one, near the front of the court, were the only cars there. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon.
Gloria got out of the car when he did and walked around the hood to meet him at the door of the room. They both looked at the front of the Caddy. It was scratched, one light was broken, and the grill was partially smashed in. There was a good-sized dent in one fender and the bumper guard was slightly bent.
Gloria turned to the motel room door without comment and Adam opened it. She walked in ahead of him, which gave him his first chance to study her backside. It was fancy. The dress she wore was white linen, thin, and it clung cunningly to her tender buttocks-the cheeks came out and curved around-two well-defined and slightly elongated hemispheres, the cleft between them evident. There was a tremble in the white linen as she walked, showing how springy she was and that she didn't give much of a damn for girdles.
Adam closed the door, locked it, and threw the key on the dresser. An air conditioner was whispering, making the room pleasantly cool. The Venetian shades were closed, making it dim. The place was decorated in brown, beige and gold, with some touches of muted green. Across from them, a half-open door revealed a gleaming tiled bathroom. In front of them, the king-sized bed loomed wide and long.
"Well?" Gloria inquired sexily as she turned to face Adam. Her pink lips quirked. Her wavy blonde hair looked like somebody had just tousled it with his hands.
Adam cradled her elbows, holding her a foot or so from him, and looked her right in the eyes. "You said you didn't want questions or quibbling," he told her, "but there's one thing I have to know. You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and I could eat you alive, but I'm a certain kind of guy. I have to have answers for things."
He paused but she said nothing. She was waiting, the sparkling look still on her face. She was giving him all the time he needed for his speech.
"If this is just the way you are ... Okay. I won't argue a minute. But if there's some special reason ... "
She hesitated, her eyes locked with his, then she said, "There's a special reason." She turned away from him.
"Want to tell me?"
She moved to a chair, lit in it, and crossed her legs in a single fluid motion. The hem of her skirt came above her knees, showing lots of well-filled nylon. He remembered momentarily what he had seen before, when he had lifted her out of the car-the thighs and everything. Suddenly he told himself that he was crazy to make her talk about it. Maybe she'd get out of the mood. She had warned him about talking the thing away. Still, it bugged him. He had to have some kind of explanation from her.
"There was a man," she said flatly. "He had told me that he loved me. I was in love with him. We were having an affair. He's an actor. If I mentioned his name you'd know it, but there's been nothing printed on us and I'd rather not have it get around."
Adam waited for her to go on.
"He came to San Francisco on location and, after a few days, I drove up from Hollywood to surprise him. I thought he'd be happy to see me. When I got there, they told me he'd left town overnight. I found out where he'd gone-a little resort a few miles from here-so like a silly goose I drove over and walked into his room. I found him all right." She stared at Adam, her eyes suddenly like bits of ice. "He was on top of some chippy, riding her like hell. Now do you understand?"
Adam blinked at her. "Maybe."
Suddenly she stood in front of him. "Well, that's all I can tell you. Now, do you want me or don't you? Say something fast or I'll get the hell out of here."
"I want you," he said.
Their bodies came together in a feverish embrace.
THREE
He toppled her onto the wide bed, lust rising in him like steam in a boiler. The one embrace they'd had-her big full breasts punching against him, her panting open mouth under his, her tongue like a slithery lance jabbing him-had swept away all doubts, all questions.
Whatever her reason, it was clear that she wanted him. Or, at least, she wanted a man-a man who would give it to her the way she had to have itand now.
Adam was that man, he told himself with certainty. He grabbed both sides of her white dress and pulled it high-as high as it had been when he'd lifted her out of the car-then higher, until he had it up around her waist. He reached for her pants.
There would be no caresses now, no soft words, no tonguing of her flesh. There was just one thing that each of them needed, and they needed it like a hungry wolf needs fresh meat.
Adam yanked her pants brutally, hearing them rip, feeling them become confetti in his hands. She released a cry, high-pitched and mewing, as if she could hardly wait to feel him in there.
He threw her torn pants away and clawed at his belt while he watched her blonde-pelted middle move up and down and squirm. Her knees were up, her legs moving back and forth. She stared at him, her head twisted slightly on the pillow so that she could see.
Adam shucked his levis down and then his jockey shorts, which freed him.
Gloria caught her breath and said, "Wow!"
She stretched her head back and looked at the ceiling. Her arms were straight, her fingers clenching the blankets.
Adam bent over her, tore at the remaining button on the front of her dress, and stuck the first two fingers of his right hand into the front of her brassiere. He yanked viciously, tearing the garment in two, and with a back and forth sweep of his hand slapped both sides of the bra and dress top away. Her high-mounding, coral-nippled breasts were bare.
"Come on, Adam!" she said huskily. "Come on! Give me what I need!"
She raised her stockinged legs in the air, forming a lovely inviting V. He lunged on the bed and Gloria let out a sharp moan when she felt him. She embraced him with her legs and helped as he drove down and forward.
A ragged growl left Adam's throat as the smooth, tight, slippery warmth took him. All of him. All at once. It was a thrill that no other entry stroke had ever given him. She let out a cry and then began to move-pistoning and squirming, her knotted legs tight around him. Adam propped himself on straight arms and watched the contortions on her face. Hell, he didn't have to do anything if he didn't want to. He'd never before been with a woman who had taken off like that.
But he wanted to do something. He wanted to move. He wanted to ram and batter her with the same force she was using against him. He began to go and he knew there would be no holding back.
He put it to her hard and she just about went crazy. She uttered a string of high-pitched little moaning sounds, punctuated by gasping. She writhed and rolled as if she was trying to devour and digest him.
She said, "Oh, damn, you can do it! Oh, drive me crazy, Adam! Kill me with it!"
He felt himself getting there quicker than he ever had-quicker than he wanted to. But the way she was going, he couldn't help it and there was no slowing her down. He guessed she was almost at the apex, too.
He pulled out all the stops to bring her with him. His hips pounded and ground. Her fingernails tore at his back; her heels beat against him. She was taking all he could give and asking for more.
Faster, still. Faster and harder.
Harder.
Faster.
He had to be there. He couldn't hold out any longer. He couldn't.
Suddenly Gloria released an open-mouthed cry as a gigantic spasm shook her, rippling through her body. She shuddered and clutched him with every part of her, her litheness seeming to envelop him entirely.
And then Adam let out a ragged, triumphant groan.
One moment he'd been riding a roman candle high in the air and then it was as if the head of it had burst apart and he was in the midst of a gigantic shower of brilliant stars.
He fell dead-weight atop her. The dirt ran off his bare chest in rivulets of sweat and smudged her rumpled white dress. She was sweating, too. He moaned and she made a sound that resembled a feline purr.
Only then did he turn his head and slide his face down to the cushiony mounds of her breasts. Her nipples were high and crisp in crinkly pink rings. He slid his lips to the left one, extended his tongue to touch it, then took it entirely within his mouth.
"Oh, lover," Gloria whispered. "Oh, lover, you're so good for me!"
Almost immediately she took her breast from him and moved off the edge of the bed. Standing, she held her rumpled dress in one hand and extended the other forearm across her chest to hide the twin creamy mounds from his view.
"Hey!" he protested, reaching for her.
She danced around the foot of the bed, treating him to a fleeting side view of tossing fleshy globes that seemed to be mounted on springs, and then went to the bathroom. "I'm first," she called gaily as she ducked into the small adjoining room and closed the door. The lock snapped.
Adam got off the bed, adjusted his clothes, and dug crumpled cigarettes from the front pocket of his jeans. He fitted one to his mouth and lit it. The first drag seemed to go all the way to his heels.
It had been an experience, all right! It had been like flying head-on into the middle of a storm.
He flopped into a chair, smoked his cigarette, and thought about it. He had had lots of women before, but this had been wild!
He listened to the rush of the shower and visualized her standing in there, the needle points of water pricking her all over.
Once wasn't enough. Once could never be enough with Gloria, he decided. He could hardly wait for her to come out. The next time, he promised himself, it would be slow and thorough. He would first become acquainted with her, with every part of her-every inch, every curve and cleft and dimple.
Yes. Just the thought of it made his passion start to rise again. Hell, he would never be able to get enough of that!
Adam looked down at himself, then noted how dirty he was. He would have to follow her into the shower, he decided. He wondered why she had rushed in there instead of both of them showering together. He had done that with girls on two or three occasions and it had been fun.
But, no, it wouldn't be fitting, he decided. Not now. Not so soon. He had to get to know her, first-to become thoroughly acquainted with her body, comfortably and at leisure.
Suddenly he laughed at himself. What was he thinking of? As if he would ever see her again! As if there would be more for them than just this one frantic afternoon!
The shower stopped and, a few moments later, the bathroom door opened. Gloria stood there wrapped in a towel. No actress could compare with the way she looked right then.
"The shower's all yours now, if you want it." She smiled, cocking her head to one side and shaking her blonde hair.
"Yeah." He stubbed out his cigarette and headed for the door. Then he stopped and faced her, a question in his eyes.
"Don't worry, tiger," she said. "I'll be waiting. Bight where you want me. Bight there." She waved a delicate hand in the direction of the bed.
She was waiting when he emerged. And he did get to know her.
He approached her completely naked and found her the same way. She was seated on the white bed, its top covers drawn over the foot and lying on the floor. Her body was glowing and golden, except for narrow cream-white strips across her breasts and loins.
For the first time he saw her breasts fully erect and uncovered. She showed them to him proudly, her eves shining; as they read his appreciation.
Gloria's breasts, though large and well-rounded, were high and firm as well. That was what made them rare. Most heavy breasts tend to hang to some extent, even on young girls, but Gloria's didn't. That was due, Adam guessed, to consistent exercising which had strengthened the right muscles. (He was later to learn that in school she had played a lot of basketball and that she had always been fond of swimming and tennis. Then, too, she had doubtless been born with pectoral muscles that were superior, having come from hardy German and Scandinavian stock.) At any rate, her breasts were large, and they were full, and they stood out on her chest like artillery shells. Adding the touch of perfection, they had just enough plumpness to provide a delicious give and also a surface shimmy that made a man's mouth water.
On a later occasion, when Gloria described to Adam the incident beside the hotel swimming pool in Palm Springs which had marked her "discovery" for Hollywood, Adam remembered his own first view of her breasts and he knew exactly how the assistant director from Melwyn Studio had felt when he saw them.
As Gloria told it, she was wearing a pink bikini-one in which she would not have dared enter the water-and she was walking along the edge of the huge rectangular pool, headed for a chaise lounge which her girl friend was saving for her.
Henry L. Ott-tall, skinny, almost bald at forty, and wearing swim trunks and glasses-was seated a few yards from the pool's edge where he had been reading a paperback mystery novel. He glanced up just as Gloria approached in front of him.
She realized that her lush out-thrust breasts were jogging up and down. They always jogged up and down when she walked. When she was normally dressed, a brassiere limited the jogging. But the bikini bandeau which then stretched across their peaks, leaving their entire upper halves bare, did little to restrain the springy natural bounce of them.
Henry Ott glanced and saw and unconsciously grasped the edge of his glasses, fitting them more securely on his nose. He stared.
His sudden movement had been evident to Gloria from the corner of her eye, but she had paid no attention. She was used to drawing such reactions from men. Frequently they led to complications-some pleasant and some otherwise, depending upon her mood and the qualities of the man in question.
Henry Ott wasn't the only man at the hotel pool who had stopped what he was doing or thinking the moment that Gloria appeared. The perfection of her figure had claimed the obvious attention of all males present, to the equally obvious displeasure of several wives and girl friends. Henry Ott was different than the others, however, in what he determined to do about the sight before him.
It so happened, as Gloria was to learn, that Ott's studio was in the process of searching for a girl to play the second feminine lead in a picture on which he was about to start work. The director had discussed with him the qualifications which the girl would need. Foremost among them was vibrant sex appeal. They wanted a new, fresh personality-youthful, blonde and very well built. She didn't need to have any particularly acting ability because the script didn't call for it What they wanted was a sex boat.
Hollywood harbored many sex boats and Henry and his boss had interviewed a good number of them, trying to find one with the freshness and particular appeal demanded. They had narrowed the search down to three possibles and were about to make a choice among those three when Henry saw Gloria.
The sight rang a bell in his brain, as well as producing certain more tangible effects, and he said to himself that she was just what they wanted.
He eyed her carefully as she stopped beside the chaise lounge and stood for a moment, unselfconsciously displaying the outcurving half-moons of her buttocks, which were not entirely covered by the pink bikini pants she wore. The process of walking had caused the fabric to pull slightly into the crevice between her posterior cheeks and had bared their pinchable undercurves.
After he had thoroughly appraised her derriere, Ott noted that her waist was small and her thighs full and long. Her flesh, which had not been exposed to the sun for three long winter months, was the color of canned cream. Her hair, though Ott doubted this could be the case, seemed lustrous enough to be naturally blonde.
When she described the incident to Adam, Gloria said that her first reaction to Henry Ott's approach was to laugh. She thought he was attempting a pickup and it struck her as comical that such a gawky, unpoised man (to say nothing of his age) would think he stood a chance with her. She was about to send him on his way with a few perhaps unclever but pointed words, when his mention of the name Melwyn Studios registered in her mind. She remained quiet and listened to the rest of what he had to say.
Gloria had come to California alone, two years before, intending to study dramatics and to try and break into motion pictures or TV. She had always been told she was extremely beautiful and she had decided that her yearning for self-expression could find its best outlet in some branch of show business. So she had withdrawn from a Minneapolis bank the remainder of the inheritance derived from her parents, both of whom had died in a plane crash when she was seven, and she had made the trip west.
She took an apartment in Hollywood and enrolled in dramatics school only to let her plans be thrown into limbo three months later by a sudden marriage to an itinerant salesman who lived in the same apartment building and with whom she had fallen passionately in love. Immediately after the marriage he gave up the job he had held for six weeks and seemed to have great difficulty in landing another one. He and Gloria lived up what was left of her inheritance in a few riotous months spent mostly in bars and in bed, after which the salesman took off, never to be heard from again. Somehow surviving the pain of his leaving, Gloria obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion.
On the day of her "discovery" by Henry Ott, she was taking her first weekend of sun after a winter spent for the most part in an insurance company office where she typed accident claims. Although she really could not afford Palm Springs rates, she and another girl had pooled their resources and gone anyway.
Gloria had not visited the posh resort with any intention of husband-hunting, and she'd had no idea of being "discovered" for movies or anything else. Her show business aspirations had remained where her marriage and subsequent loss of funds had left them, and for a little over a year she had been pursuing the kind of course followed by most people-one of drifting to the accompaniment of vague dreams about what would some day come to pass.
But in Gloria's case the some day really came. When it did, it was as unexpected as a snow storm in Honolulu.
Gloria had her screen test two days after Henry Ott first saw her, and in another two days she signed a contract.
She once told Adam that it surprised her to discover she didn't have to sleep with anybody to get the job. The men involved-Henry, his immediate boss, and the studio executive who okayed the deal-all looked her over as if she was a prize heifer at a livestock show, but not once was there a hint that any special inducement on her part was called for. They wanted her for the picture, she signed, and that was it. Nothing could have been simpler.
Her first role set her up for a starring one and, with the second picture, her career was set. Gloria's bedroom skills had not been called upon and neither had any particular acting talent. Her sexy, piquant face helped to put her across-but, most of all, it was her breasts and the rest of her figure.
They had made her a star and kept her on top of the Hollywood heap for three years by the time she and Adam met.
* * *
Immediately upon his. return from the shower, Adam sat on the bed beside her, pulled her smooth back against the front of him, and kissed her neck. At the same time he slipped his hands beneath her arms and to her front, letting each of them grasp a large and lovely boobie.
He contracted his fingers on the resilient fullness, working slowly and with deliberation. He tested each of the thrusting globes from its base out to its quivering end. Then he grasped each nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed and rubbed it carefully. Looking down, he watched the nipples assert themselves, swelling and stretching outward before his eyes. He pulled at them until they became very long. They were deep pink. The aureols that ringed them were a lighter shade, not overly large, and they blended at their perimeters into the cream tone of her surrounding flesh.
After he had brought Gloria's nipples to maximum extension, he held the fullness of both breasts in his hands and gently waggled them back and forth. She moaned softly and thrust her head back. Her eyes were closed, her lips moistly parted.
Still holding and kneading her bust, he kissed her all around the neck and ears and on both of her shoulders. Then he gently withdrew and eased her onto her back.
Adam bent over her, kissed the inner curves of her elbows, her wrists, and the tip of each finger. Then he moved suddenly, bringing his mouth to the standing pink buds of her bosom. Caressing and gently squeezing her right breast between both of his hands, he let its crisp nipple slip between his lips, onto his tongue, and then deep inside his mouth. Gloria moaned. He drew on it, gently shaking the breast with his hands as he did so.
When he had savored the right mound sufficiently, he let it go. Glistening, it bobbed free. Then he went to the left one, first nipping at its tip, then tonguing it, and finally drawing into his mouth as much of it as he could hold. He shook that one, also.
Gloria was now squirming ... heating ... wanting him.
He was determined, this time, to make her wait and to make himself wait, as well.
Leaving her bosom, he brushed his lips lightly across the smooth flesh above her navel, flicking his tongue from time to time. Then, suddenly, he placed his mouth directly over the dainty little cup and let his tongue-tip delve inside. Gloria squirmed more anxiously beneath him.
Adam straightened up, slid toward the foot of the bed, and bent to her toes. Taking her tiny right foot in his hand, he kissed the toes in turn, and then her instep, her ankle, and he began a slow journey up the inside of her right calf. When he reached her knee, he kissed the dimpled top of it, the underlease, and then moved quickly down to the left foot.
Gloria let him hold and kiss it while she twisted and turned her other leg excitedly. By the time he had ministered to her left knee, he changed positions, placing himself on his haunches between her feet. Then he bent to fasten his lips to the inner slope of her left thigh just above the knee.
He nibbled the flesh he found there, then slowly started to move upward, letting his tongue trail on the satiny surface while he held her leg in both hands and lifted it. Gloria was now making mindless little sounds and both legs were active. But Adam remained bent upon his meticulous course. He kissed her up to mid-thigh and all the way around, then jumped to the other leg, tasting and teasing it from the knee upward. Adam was aware that her midsection was moving anxiously. Gloria was saying things, now, interspersed with mindless passionate sounds. She was using words like lover and baby and darling ... and others, too.
Suddenly Adam raised up, grasped her firmly at the hips, and urged her onto her belly. He placed one hand at the outer side of each of her perfectly mounded buttocks, the thumbs following their undercurves, and he shook them gently. Then he bent to kiss first one and the other.
Gloria was panting and giving out harsh little moans. She began to twist violently and he let her turn over to her back.
She gazed at him imploringly, her arms extended to cradle his face as he leaned over her. "You know what I want, don't you, lover? Please ... oh, please ... oh...."
Adam knew what she wanted. He had done at before. Once he had been sorry afterwards; the other times he hadn't. The reaction had depended entirely on the girl. Usually he had no desire to do it at all. This time, however, he was eager. Gloria's body was sweet and adorable.
As he pressed his face to hers, she voiced a delighted little cry. It was ecstatic! She twined her fingers in his hair and moved her legs anxiously, their satin surfaces rubbing against him. He took as much time as he thought she could stand, actually enjoying the acts of intimacy, and then he raised up, sitting back on his heels.
What Gloria then did, he had not expected. It came from sheer, spontaneous desire on her part. She embraced his body, and slowly came to him. Adam jammed his eyes closed and was forced to clench his teeth against the excruciating pleasure of it.
Finally he grasped her shoulders and pressed her away from him and back against the bed.
The time was right and he extended himself fully over her, supported on elbows and knees. She told him what she wanted in words that ladies are apt to use only at such a time.
He did not disappoint her.
The penetration was as clean and smooth and complete as it had been before but, this time, Adam didn't let her use him quickly. He proceeded in measured strokes, listening to the little sounds she made, holding; himself on straight arms and watching the anguished contortions of her face, and seeing her nipples dance.
It was a long, slow, thorough bout that ended in a mighty convulsion of flesh against flesh. At the finish, he seemed to be more with her than he had ever been with any woman in his life.
They remained locked together for minutes afterwards with Adam nuzzling her neck, and finally, for the first time since their initial embrace, kissing her open mouth. He captured each of her soft lips in turn between his own and then let his tongue trace them, after which their mouths blended fully and deeply.
When he finally swung from her and onto his back, Gloria breathed, "What a man!"
She came to him then like a puppy or a little child, nuzzling his sweat-soaked nakedness, her arms wrapped around his massive chest. And it was then she said it:
"Oh, Adam, I need you so! I want you forever. Adam ... please marry me!"
FOUR
It would not have happened had not the leading circumstances been exactly as they were and had not Gloria been exactly as she was.
During the few quiet times that she and Adam later shared-the rare occasions when he really got to know her-he found out why it was so.
Born Gloria Kisinger in a small town in Michigan, the daughter of a moderately prosperous druggist, she began life surrounded by the comforts and conveniences regarded as essentials in the Kisinger's social stratum, and even some luxuries which others of their class did not have. Outstanding among these, and the pride of her father, was a two-seated Piper Cub which he flew on weekends, frequently taking Gloria's mother with him while the girl and her older brother remained in the care of an aunt.
Her father was regarded as an excellent pilot and a careful man. To him, Sunday flying was as safe as Sunday driving in the family Oldsmobile, and he would have taken the children along had the plane been large enough to carry that many persons. He had planned to buy a larger plane but had never gotten around to it.
One Sunday afternoon, in a sudden thunderstorm, the plane's instruments became damaged. It went off course, ran out of fuel, and crashed in the cold water of Lake Huron, carrying both of Gloria's parents to their deaths. Gloria was then seven years old.
Her remaining childhood was spent in a succession of homes. For awhile she remained in the care of the aunt with whom her father had placed her before taking off on his final flight, but the woman's husband had harbored a resentment of Gloria's father and soon insisted that she be placed elsewhere.
Gloria's brother had already been accepted by their father's only remaining relative and so Gloria was shipped to a small town in Minnesota and put in the care of her mother's half-sister who had six children of her own. Gloria was never really welcome in the home and, after a few months, other arrangements had to be made.
Another family in the same town cared for her a while, but when Gloria's inheritance allowance was temporarily stopped as the result of a legal snarl and the extra mouth to feed became a burden, they passed her on to the County as a public charge.
Gloria lived for over a year in a County orphanage, then was placed in a foster home.
At sixteen she quit school and took a bus to Minneapolis where she lied about her age and went to work clerking in a five-and-dime.
Gloria had blossomed at twelve. By sixteen she had the looks and apparent self-assurance of an eighteen-year-old, her drifting, love-starved childhood having caused her to acquire a shell of superficial strength. Beneath the shell, however, she was a frightened little girl.
She remained, Adam was to learn, a frightened little girl to the day he walked out of their Brentwood, California, home.
The unhappy affair which had put Gloria Trent on Highway 101 the day they met, and had caused her to be driving with closed eyes at speeds up to eighty-five miles an hour, was merely one of a long series of romantic involvements which had turned sour.
Gloria Trent, as excitingly beautiful as she was, had little luck with men. One reason, as Adam figured it out, was that her insecurity tended to draw her to the wrong kind.
Take her first husband, for instance:
His name was Jerry Williams. When Gloria met him, at the age of 20, he was 26.
Jerry was the smooth type-the sort of guy who, in one look at a girl, saw her stripped to the pelt and in action, and before looking away had made up his mind whether or not she would be worth the making. If no, he never thought of her again. If yes, he made her, or at least he gave the project his best try. And Jerry seldom missed. His average was somewhere in the high eight hundreds.
Jerry had everything going for him. In addition to a smooth, self-assured manner, he had a good practical brain, an instinctive knowledge of human nature, and the sort of animalistic appeal that ex cites women. He was six-one, weighed an even two hundred pounds which nature had economically distributed over a large-boned frame, and he had a wealth of lustrous black hair and warm brown eyes.
Jerry had a couple of girls on the string when Gloria moved into the apartment house on Yucca Street. But the minute he saw her, the others were forgotten. Not only had her looks inflamed him, but he could tell that she was susceptible. He knew it as surely as a weather forecaster knows whether or not it's going to turn warm. Once in a while he was wrong, but it wouldn't have been wise to bet against him.
He decided from the look in Gloria's eyes and from the way she talked, during their first casual conversation, that she needed someone. That was all the encouragement he required. Gloria, to the perceptive eye, had that look about her-the look of needing. What she needed was someone who would love and appreciate her as a human being.
Jerry Williams wasn't that guy. All Jerry wanted from women he could get in bed, and all he had to give them was on the same level.
There was another thing about Jerry, also, which didn't make him good for Gloria: he didn't like to work. When he found out, on their first date, that Gloria had money in the bank to finance her theatrical schooling, he saw a two-way opportunity for himself. He immediately began laying plans-plans for laying. He planned to lay Gloria and lay his hands on her money at the same time.
He realized that there was only one way for him to fleece her safely, and that would be via the marriage route. Jerry was not averse to that. As he saw it, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
He had gone that way twice before, as Gloria was eventually to learn. At nineteen he had married a divorcee six years his senior and had done her out of all she had taken from her first hubby. At twenty-four he had married again, this time latching onto a dame who was pushing forty-five. She had kept him in good scotch and cigars for about a year before the well ran dry.
Divorces were no problem for Jerry. When the time was right, he merely walked out and let his wives worry about the legal hangovers. Each of them, being the type of women they were, could hardly wait to marry again. In freeing themselves, they had to set him free at the same time. There were no attempts to get alimony because, when he left them, Jerry was as broke as they were, and they knew him well enough to realize that any attempt to make him support them would be like trying to get water from a stone.
All Jerry had when he met Gloria was a three-year-old Cadillac on which he made payments only when the finance boys caught up with him, a presentable wardrobe, fifty bucks in cash, and a job he had held for six weeks. The job was selling encyclopedias.
Jerry didn't know enough about the books or what they contained to fool a high school freshman, but he knew enough about women to fool suburban housewives. And what more did he need?
When he had a young mother convinced that an encyclopedia was just what little Johnny had to have to help him out in school, she sold the old man for him. But it wasn't always little Johnny's welfare that was uppermost in her mind when the housewife made her decision. Jerry talked about Johnny, and the woman usually found it easy to convince herself that Johnny needed the books. (After all, she was a good mother, wasn't she?) But underneath, what really sold her, was the look in Jerry Williams' eyes ... the way he managed to lean against her when he showed her the brochures ... and sometimes more, when Jerry saw she was ready for it.
He found that many suburban housewives were bored with the daily routine-and frequently the nightly routine, as well. Painfully aware that they were getting older, nothing seemed to lie ahead but more kids, bridge games and endless housework. Most of them were respectable. But, still....
It's enough to say that Jerry Williams did well. At the same time, however, he found the job too confining. Why work, even on that basis, if he could latch onto a chick who would pay his bills?
And when the chick was stacked like Gloria ... well, Jerry would never have looked himself in the eye again if he hadn't gone all-out to win her. So that was exactly what he did. And Gloria was no more able to resist him than a kid can resist a stick of candy.
Gloria hadn't liked to talk about her four months as Jerry's wife, but Adam eventually heard most of the story. It came out in fragments, usually when she was half-high and hungering for the love and understanding that Adam never seemed able fully to give her.
She told him of the wild times she and Jerry had shared, of the roaring passion that had flowed between them-the animalistic surge that had passed for love.
Jerry convinced her that he had a big deal on the brink of completion which would net them a sure income of from two to three thousand dollars a month. It had to do with the promotion of a new product, in which he claimed to have an interest. On the strength of that, Gloria," temporarily" withdrew from dramatics school and did not object too strenuously when she saw her bank account draining. Jerry was a good convincer.
They traveled from Palm Springs to Vegas to Tahoe to San Francisco, visiting all the better bars, drinking the best booze, and banging hell out of two dozen beds.
It was wild, and the money went fast. As soon as it was gone, Jerry told her goodbye.
"The deal fell through, baby," he said. "Tough, but the other guy just changed his mind. One of those things. Now there's this big opportunity in Alaska, but it just wouldn't do for you to go with me.
Gloria watched in stunned silence as he packed his clothes. At the door, he grinned and said, "I'll write you, honey. Be good, now."
And he left her with little more than that to say.
Gloria went into paroxysms of crying, followed by the gulping of a bottle of sleeping pills. But, immediately afterward, she called the doctor who had prescribed them, getting him out of bed at three in the morning. She didn't want to die.
She never heard from Jerry again and, in time, she obtained a default divorce. Her show business ambitions shattered, she went to work as a waitress while taking a short course to brush up on her high school typing and shorthand. Then she obtained a job in the Los Angeles office of a large insurance company.
The entire experience with Jerry, and the attendant sacrifice of her hoped-for show business career, served to increase the sense of insecurity which had haunted Gloria since she was a small child. In the months that followed, she went out with men, but permitted herself to become serious with none of them. Their desire for her, as far as she could tell, was no different in kind than the lust she had excited in Jerry.
She remained a person crying out for love.
When the doors of Hollywood opened, as a result of her chance encounter with Henry Ott at Palm Springs, Gloria felt that at last she would find appreciation for herself as a person. But this was still denied her. Hollywood didn't want her, she found. It merely wanted a lush, seductive body to flaunt on the movie screens of the world. To her "discoverers" and to the ones she worked with, she was little more than a set of animated curves-a sexboat.
She worked hard at learning to act, spending on dramatics coaching a large share of the first money she made. But she was given no chance to prove herself. When she asked for better parts, her agent and others merely smiled and continued to offer her roles which required only that she show her breasts and look sexy.
Gloria Trent (her real name having been dropped for professional reasons) became the breast-queen of Hollywood-the girl touted as the possessor of the very best set in all the world. While censorial restrictions prevented the entirety of her treasure from being displayed for American view, in the European versions of her pictures she was bared completely to the waist. The form and coloring of her nipples became almost as familiar to Frenchmen and Italians as the nipples of their own wives and girl friends.
The men in the film colony who pursued Gloria-from top stars down to the hangers-on and phonies with which Hollywood abounds-seemed as mesmerized by her public image as were the fans. She was, to them also, little more than a sex symbol-a mere objective to be taken, as a mountain is there to be climbed.
It proved to be the same way with Tony Braden-the only one of the lot that Gloria thought she really loved, and the one from whose hideaway she had been fleeing on the afternoon she and Adam met.
She came to Adam in a state of inner desolation and, to her, he loomed as a fortress of strength. He was big and manly and, most important of all, he was not of Hollywood. In her deep loneliness-which the shock of Tony Braden's infidelity had pressed suddenly to the forefront of her mind-Gloria reached out to Adam as one who is drowning reaches for a line.
As he stretched out on his bed in Mrs. Scofield's rooming house and thought back over his life with Gloria, Adam considered how he had come to fall into the trap.
Though engaged in menial work, Adam was not without some education. He had graduated from high school and attended two years of college before the urge to roam became too much for him and made him take off to see America. He had seen it-its best and its worst-supporting himself with whatever jobs he could find along the way. He'd had his fun, too, and he thought he had gained enough experience to let him see life in correct perspective.
But he was as ill prepared for the impact of Gloria Trent upon his life as a snowman is for summer. Who she was and what she was dazzled him, and the heat of their loving on that first afternoon reduced him to a state of vulnerability which he would hardly have thought possible. Adam wasn't a novice with women, but he had never known one like Gloria before.
The idea of being proposed to by a woman offended him, but not to the extent that he could turn Gloria Trent down. At first, he hardly believed what he had heard, just as earlier he had hardly believed that she wanted to go to bed with him. She smothered his bewilderment by wrapping him in her lithe body, covering his bare chest with kisses, and telling him he was the man she had always wanted.
They left the motel late that afternoon, barely in time to visit a local store where Gloria spent close to three hundred dollars on clothes for Adam and herself. To forestall anxiety over her disappearance, she called her business manager in Hollywood and told him she would be away for a few days. Then she and Adam pointed her battered Cadillac in the direction of Reno.
They were married there at one o'clock the following morning.
Adam began to think about what happened after wards, in their Reno hotel room, during the remainder of that night and the entire following day.
Suddenly he leaped to his feet, squashed out the butt of his fourth or fifth cigarette, and decided that what he needed was a woman. He showered, changed clothes, and went out to find one for the first time since he had arrived in Perkins a couple of weeks before.
FIVE
Roy Spengler, sitting alone in his Rossmore Avenue apartment, clinked the ice cubes in his tall glass of bourbon and soda and wondered where in hell he was going to get the dough to pay next month's rent on his office.
It was due the following day-one hundred and twenty bucks for the hole-in-the-wall he occupied on the second floor of a Vine Street store building. He had exactly twenty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents to his name. He had just counted it. His finances hadn't been so low since last Christmas week which he had spent in Vegas.
Being a private detective was a chancy way to make a living, especially for a guy with Roy Spengler's reputation. He didn't get the industrial and damage suit assignments that kept most of the reputable agencies going. The run-ins he'd had with the law and the attendant lurid publicity, while not serious enough to cause the loss of his license, had nevertheless discouraged calls from lawyers and corporations. But that was all right with Spengler. He had long ago chosen the route he wanted to take and, in the long run, he hadn't been sorry.
Spengler's specialty was domestic jobs of all kinds, including the sort that many agencies wouldn't touch. He was known throughout the film colony as the boy to call when a particularly messy job needed doing. The messier they were, the better, as far as Spengler was concerned, because the messy ones paid big. Hollywood was the world's best hunting ground for cases of that type. He sometimes had to wait a long time for a real juicy one to come along but, when it did, it made up for a number of lean months. Such a deal was long overdue.
Spengler's agency was a one-man operation. He didn't even employ a girl in his office. He did everything himself, even including the typing of his own letters and reports. This precluded his fooling around with penny-ante cases, and that was all right, too. He preferred to sit on his can and wait for a few good ones, then sock it to the clients for all he could get.
The big advantage his clients enjoyed was that he was the only person in the world who knew what he was working on, and Roy Spengler kept his mouth shut. Though it was known that he didn't hesitate to shake his clients down for extravagant fees when he had the chance, it was also understood that they could count on his secrecy. And that made him worth the price he asked.
There was another thing about Roy Spengler: he wasn't averse to taking part of his remuneration out in trade. Spengler wasn't hungry for money for its own sake; he cared only for what it could buy. Next to food and rent, most of his dough went for broads and booze. It followed, therefore, that if the client was female and attractive enough-as many of his clients were-he was glad to work out a special "arrangement" with her. Many Hollywood women, he had found, were accustomed to trading on their bodies. They had done it with producers and others who were in a position to advance their careers, and even with their lawyers at times. So why not with a detective?
Acting on this premise, Spengler had gotten into some of Hollywood's best.
Those were the jobs Roy Spengler most liked-the kind where he could mix pleasure with business and still come out with a pile of loot. He always had his eye out for them. Life was too short to pass up anything, he figured.
Just before his telephone rang on that particular evening, Roy Spengler was deep in thought on the question of whom he could tap for the hundred and twenty clams he would need the following day. The phone bell jarred him to attention and he set down his bourbon and soda to pick up the receiver. "Yeah?" he asked guardedly. He thought it might be a bill collector.
"Mr. Spengler?" a feminine voice asked. It was a sweet voice, but sexy at the same time. It was the kind of voice Spengler liked to hear on a pillow at three o'clock in the morning.
"Speaking," he said and waited.
"I'm sorry to disturb you at home like this," the caller said, "but the party who gave me your number said you wouldn't mind." She hesitated. "I understand that you're a ... private investigator?"
"That's right," Spengler said, his interest perking up. "What can I do for you?"
The woman cleared her throat. "It's something I don't want to discuss on the telephone. I wonder ... if it would be possible for me to come over there. I think that might be better than for us to meet at my home or at your office."
Spengler glanced at his watch. It was quarter after nine. "Certainly," he said. "Who am I talking to?"
"For the time being, you can call me Mrs. Taylor. How soon may I see you?"
"Anytime, Mrs. Taylor. I'm at your disposal."
"Right away?" she asked. There was a note of tension in her voice.
"Certainly. Do you know my address?"
"I have it."
"I'll be expecting you," Spengler said. After waiting for her "goodbye," he hung up.
As he picked up his glass again, he told himself, that this might prove to be the deal for which he had been waiting. Spengler had got so he could almost smell them. Mrs. Taylor, hm? He wondered who it was who chose to hide her identity in that name. Her obvious anxiety and her desire not to be seen at his office or to have him seen at her home indicated that she might be pretty high on the Hollywood list and that her business with him was the sort she didn't want others to know about. That was encouraging.
He smiled to himself in anticipation and drained his glass. Yes, this just might be that special deal-the really fat one that he needed. Hell, it might not only pay his living expenses for the next few months, but give him a good chunk of broad and booze money, too.
He needed broad money almost as urgently as he needed the hundred and twenty for office rent. It had been so damned long since he'd had a go with a high-class whore that he'd almost forgotten what the good stuff was like ... the long, warm thighs ... the full breasts ... the smooth, taut mounds of their backsides....
Yeah!
Maybe, Roy Spengler told himself, this was his night.
He reached for the bottle of bourbon on the table, then withdrew his hand. He'd had enough, he decided. He had better lay off the hootch until he'd had his meeting with Mrs. Taylor, whoever she was. Clients weren't usually impressed by the smell of liquor on a detective's breath.
With that thought in mind, Spengler walked into his bedroom and took a role of mints from the top drawer of his dresser. He popped two of them into his mouth, then returned to the living room and placed the bourbon bottle and glass in his small liquor cabinet and closed the door.
Glancing at himself in a narrow wall mirror, he raised a hand to smooth back his thinning brown hair. Roy Spengler was short, slim and wiry in gray slacks and a conservative blue and white checked sportshirt. He was thirty-eight years old. He turned from the mirror, picked a cigarette off a table, and lit it.
Mrs. Taylor.
Spengler didn't have to wait long to meet the woman who had given him that name. Twelve minutes later she rang his door buzzer and, with his first look at her', his curiosity was satisfied. Even though she was wearing dark glasses and had her blonde hair concealed by a wrap-around scarf, he recognized Gloria Trent. At that moment he told himself that his hunch had been correct-this indeed was the deal.
He smiled broadly. "Come in ... Mrs. Taylor."
The woman's eyes shifted from left to right, searching the room behind him.
"I'm alone," he told her, holding the door.
She walked in. Her clothes were as well calculated to conceal her identity as were the dark glasses and scarf, particularly the gray coat that was loose fitting and came down just far enough to hide all her famous curves. Below it, her legs were encased in contoured black pants and she wore high-heeled shoes.
"May I take your coat, Mrs. Taylor?" Spengler asked.
As she opened it quickly and shrugged it off, the detective's eyes widened. Underneath she wore a black jersey that was so tight her large upright breasts were fully and vividly out-lined. As she turned and walked toward the center of the room, her perfect backside twisted in the thin, snug-fitting pants.
Spengler lay her coat over a chair. "Sit down, won't you, please?" he invited.
She sat on the sofa and immediately crossed her legs. Then she removed her dark glasses and unwound the scarf.
"You know who I am, now, I presume," she said coolly.
Spengler nodded with a smile which he tried to keep from turning into a leer. He wasn't sure he had succeeded. The woman who sat in front of him was far and away the most attractive creature who had ever set foot (or fanny) inside his apartmentand probably the most attractive of any he had had dealings with. His mind began racing ahead to the possibility that there might be more than money in the job.
"Can I offer you a drink, Miss Trent?" he asked.
"No, thanks." She looked at him evenly, as he took a chair opposite her. "I have been told, Mr. Spengler, that you're a man of discretion. Is that right?"
He nodded. "I treat a client's business exactly as I would my own."
"Good."
She opened her bag and withdrew a cigarette which she fitted into a white holder. Spengler was on his feet with a lighter ready when she needed it. She expelled smoke in a thinly diffused spray and nodded a peremptory "thank you." The man sat down again.
She fastened her blue eyes on his dark ones. "I'll speak frankly, Mr. Spengler," she said.
"Please do."
"My husband has left me."
The announcement surprised the detective. Nothing had appeared in the gossip columns about the break-up of her well-publicized marriage and even Spengler's personal contacts, who were generally very knowledgeable, had not mentioned it to him.
"He left our home a couple of weeks ago," Gloria Trent continued. "We'd had a ... minor misunderstanding. Naturally I expected him to come back in a few days. Now, however, it doesn't look as if he intends to." She paused, still looking at Spengler evenly. "I want you to locate him."
That a guy would walk out on a wife as luscious as Gloria Trent-especially when the guy was a nobody like this Adam whatever-his-name-was-seemed surprising enough, but that she would chase after him....
Well, there was no accounting for love, he decided. More than once he'd wondered why Hollywood babes went for the guys they did. It was a question that never ceased to fascinate Spengler.
He recalled what he had read about Gloria Trent and her husband. After their surprise marriage, the newspapers had had a field-day. The story had contained plenty of built-in human interest, in view of Gloria's Hollywood eminence and the lowly status of her new husband. It had been all the more dramatic because of the path of single blessedness which Gloria had followed since arriving on the Hollywood scene nearly three years before. Many eligible males had tried to lead her into marriage, so the stories went, but she had never evinced any interest. It was well-known, however, that Gloria Trent was not averse to sex. Talk had it that she had practiced bed gymnastics with more than a few.
Spengler asked her, "Do you have any idea at all as to where your husband is?"
"No," Gloria said.
"And you haven't heard from him-not a phone call or a letter?"
"Nothing."
"I'll take the case, Miss Trent," he told her. "Of course, it presents some obvious difficulties right at the outset, particularly in view of your insistence on secrecy."
"That's necessary," she told him. "As you can understand, considering my public image, I could hardly let it be known that I was unable...." She looked down. " ... well, to hold my husband."
"Frankly, I can hardly believe it," Spengler said. As her eyes lifted again to his, he asked, "Just why, Miss Trent? I mean, how did the separation happen to occur?"
"Is it necessary to go into that?"
"I'm afraid it is," he told her. "If I am to be of any help to you, I'll have to have all the facts."
"There was another man," she said, avoiding his eyes again. I see.
"The man meant nothing to me." Gloria shrugged and what the gesture did to her lush, high-mounding breasts almost made Spengler catch his breath. "Adam misunderstood."
"That's unfortunate."
Gloria again looked at the detective. "What will your services cost me, Mr. Spengler?"
He hesitated for effect, allowing her sufficient time to prepare herself for the size of his demand. Spengler did not usually work on the per-day basis favored by most private detectives. He preferred to gamble on a lump sum, setting it high enough so that he could hardly lose regardless of how the case progressed.
"Shall we say ... fifteen thousand dollars," he stated coolly. As he saw her expression harden, but before she had sufficient time to speak, he added, "plus expenses."
"That's more than I expected to pay," she said simply.
"Well, you can see, Miss Trent, that there are considerable difficulties involved."
She looked at him thoughtfully, worrying her full lower lip between white teeth.
Spengler went on, "I will ask a retainer of two thousand dollars. The balance of thirteen thousand will be payable when I am successful in locating your husband."
"You want two thousand dollars in advance, is that it?"
He nodded. "I will bill you periodically for expenses incurred."
"I don't know, Mr. Spengler."
It was his turn to shrug. He reached for a cigarette.
"Are you free to begin work on the case immediately?"
He nodded.
"And you will do the work yourself?"
"I handle each case personally," he told her. "I will concentrate on your matter alone until your husband is found."
"You seem quite certain that you can find him," Gloria said.
"There's no one in this world who can't be located, if the search is begun soon enough as in this case."
"You'll have to be very discreet in making inquiries," she warned.
"That's understood."
Gloria stood and walked to a window which faced out across the roofs of Hollywood. Spengler remained seated, his eyes following the enticing undulations of the woman's buttocks in the skin-tight pants she wore. This was choice, he told himself. Having never before seen Gloria Trent in person, he was forced to conclude that her movies had not done her justice. She was built like few women in the world.
She stood now in front of the window, her feet a few inches apart, her round buttocks thrust backward. After studying them for some time, Spengler dropped his eyes to her full, tightly-sheathed thighs, then let them move up to where the back strap of her bra was out-lined against her snug black jersey.
Suddenly she turned to face him. "Very well, Mr. Spengler. You'll accept my check?"
"Certainly," he said.
As she walked back to the sofa he looked at the area where her legs joined. The fabric of her pants caught tightly there, pulling in alternate directions as she moved.
That husband of hers had to be crazy, Spengler concluded. Even though she'd been bed-hopping on the side, Spengler couldn't understand how a man could walk out on something like that! If the guy looked for the rest of his life, Spengler thought, he wouldn't be able to corner anything that fancy!
Gloria sat down, kept her knees together, and removed a checkbook and pen from her bag. She opened the book and began to write.
Spengler had already decided to make a play for her, but he knew that he could not do it so soon. The best time, he decided, would be after he found her husband and came to pick up the additional thirteen grand. Even if she preferred to settle solely in cash, Spengler would be in the driver's seat then. He could amend his terms for payment and there would be nothing she could do but deliver. If she didn't, he would simply refuse to give her the information on her husband's whereabouts and he would still keep the two grand he'd received. What could she do? He was sure she wouldn't kick up a fuss.
When she held the check out to him, Spengler stood and reached for it. He gave it a quick glance, folded it once, and slipped it into a pocket of his shirt.
"Now, Miss Trent, please tell me everything you can about your husband-his friends, background, special interests, a description of the car he took with him, if any-and also describe for me the circumstances at the time he left. Please be frank. Everything you tell me will be in strictest confidence, of course."
She began to talk. Spengler didn't take notes. He always relied on his memory, which years of experience had developed into an instrument of precise accuracy.
Gloria spoke without hesitation in tracing her husband's life and interests, giving Spengler as complete a picture of the man as he could possibly have desired. Then she stopped.
"And now the incident which brought about the separation," Spengler said. "Please tell me about that-as fully as possible."
She hesitated, her lower lip coming in for punishment as she looked down at the delicate hands twisting together in her lap.
Spengler took the opportunity to feast visually on the remarkable contours of her bosom. Either she was wearing one hell of a good brassiere, Spengler decided, or else she had a set of boobs like none he had ever seen! They were the kind, he decided, that cried out to be squeezed.
"Well, Miss Trent?" he prompted.
"Is this absolutely necessary?" she asked. It was obvious that the incident had been extremely painful to her, and that the pain had not yet passed. From the gist of her conversation, it was plain that Gloria Trent had taken the departure of her husband as a severe blow to her pride. The contortion of her lovely face now, as she thought back to it and struggled with herself to tell the story, revealed that she was a troubled woman-unsure and afraid. She seemed, Spengler concluded, to be afraid of life, in spite of the fact that life had given her so much of everything.
"I'm afraid you will have to tell me, Miss Trent," Spengler said. "You see, in a case of this kind, I have to be almost a psychologist as well as an investigator. That is, I have to analyze the subject, try to determine his state of mind at the time he left, and then attempt to put myself in his place. Do you understand?"
"Yes." Her voice was barely audible.
Spengler stood up and walked to his liquor cabinet. "Why don't you have a drink? It will help to relax you ... make the telling easier."
"All right," she said.
Gloria had the drink ... then a second ... and a third.
She told him the story, at first haltingly, then gradually increasing in tempo until her words were flowing like water through a broken dam. As her speech increased in rapidity, it also increased in frankness. Perhaps, Spengler decided, the liquor had helped. At any rate, all inhibitions seemed to be swept away as she poured out her soul in the manner of a patient to a psychoanalyst. Spengler sat through it in rapt attention, his eyes constantly shifting from the woman's face to the magnificent peaks of her bosom and to the tight pull of the black pants on her thighs as she crossed and recrossed her legs. This, in her own words, is what Gloria Trent said:
"I had just completed work on a picture opposite Gary Lankford. During the filming of it, an ... well, I guess you could call it an infatuation had developed between us. The script had called for some pretty frank love scenes and we had played them to the hilt.
"I won't put all the blame on Gary for what happened. It was partly my fault, I guess. Each time he held me, during the rehearsals and "takes" of those scenes, I began to feel more and more strongly attracted to him.
"Adam and I had been having trouble-nothing serious, but the usual. He was always complaining about how it felt to be married to a movie star-that sort of thing. I've heard it ever since right after we were married. He's the dominant type; that's the trouble. But I guess that's why I love him so much. He could never adjust to the fact that I was a movie star and to the kind of money I made. Lots of men would have been happy to sit beside the pool and wait for me to come home at night, but not Adam. He tried to keep busy with things-the hobbies I told you about. He wanted to get a job, but he didn't know anything except just menial things and I couldn't let him work like that. How would it have looked?
Well, that was what was bothering him-as always-and I hadn't been paying too much attention to it. It's possible, though, that Adam's attitude had something to do with the way I began to feel toward Gary.
"Anyway, by the time the picture was over, we both were kind of gone on one another and Gary had been trying ... well, trying to make me. I'd been putting him off, of course. I really loved my husband-and I still love him.
"But on the night when the picture ended, the crew gave us a little party at the studio. I had a bit too much to drink and ... oh, it was crazy, I know, but Gary was so persuasive....
"He and I took a jet to Acapulco that same night.
"I should never have done it. It was cheap and foolish and I really didn't enjoy myself-I mean, not really. We stayed there for a couple of days. Gary wanted me to stay longer, but I left him and returned to Hollywood.
"Adam was at the house when I got home and he just ripped into me. He had been prowling around the place like a caged animal. He was unshaven and had been drinking more or less steadily.
"I was afraid for my life when he came at me, and I ran. The servants were off, and there was no one there but the two of us.
"He chased me upstairs and into the bedroom where he cornered me. He forced me to tell him everything about where I'd been and then he clawed at me, ripping my clothes, and finally he got me down over his knees. Well, he'd never done anything like that before, but he yanked up my outer clothes and he ... he beat me. It was brutal and awful and I cried and kicked at him. That just made him all the more angry and finally he tore at my pants, pulling and tearing them off me, and he spanked my bare fanny.
"All the time he was yelling at me between blows, calling me a slut and a whore and all sorts of vile things and accusing me of laying for every man in Hollywood.
"Finally he threw me to the floor, opened his clothes, and got on top of me. He said, I'm going to give it to you one last time; I'm going to let you remember how damn good it is, and then you'll never see me again. And he came into me and it was wilder than it had ever been.
"He banged me and rolled me on that floor until I thought I would go crazy. And then I had it but he just kept going. He was like a pile-driver and I had it again before he finally climaxed. Then he pulled away, stood over me for a minute, and fixed his clothes.
"I lay there, hardly able to move after all that had happened, while he threw some clothes in a suitcase. By the time I'd gotten downstairs, his car was turning into the street. It was the Healy roadster that he took-a white one. I can look up the license number for you.
"The whole thing was so damn silly. I never loved anyone but Adam, ever since the first day I saw him. Oh, there had been other men. He was right about that. Don't ask me why; Anyway, it makes no difference.
'As far as Gary Lankford was concerned, I got him out of my system damn fast. What a phony! I had really thought he'd be something, the way he had been tonguing me every time we did those kissing scenes. But he was like a rabbit. It was the worst I'd ever had.
"I've never known a man who could send me like Adam! I love him; I didn't want him to go.
"I don't know what it is with me. Adam's the only man in my whole life who's seen me as a real woman-a human being-instead of just as a body to play with. That's all I've been to the rest of them-Lankford and all the ones before him-just a plaything.
"I need Adam! Oh, how I need him!"
Gloria bent forward, her face in her hands, and cried. Spengler was convinced that she did love Adam and didn't want him back just as a matter of pride.
"I'll do what I can, Miss Trent," he told her. "Leave everything to me."
SIX
Adam walked into the place called The Mine Shack and looked around. This one and Mike Sandor's were the town's only drinking places. The Mine Shack was a little fancier, the lighting a little softer, and the clientele a little cleaner, but otherwise there wasn't much to choose between the two joints. A bar ran lengthwise in the room with booths upholstered in red plastic along the opposite wall. More booths ringed the small area past the far end of the bar with three or four tables in the center.
The only women in The Mine Shack were a buxom blonde at the bar who wore a dress with a round, off-the-shoulder neckline and who must have weighed close to a hundred and seventy pounds; a toothpick-thin brunette in one of the booths, laughing and guzzling with a husky man who had a gray crewcut; and, toward the back of the room, a younger, rather appealing blonde, who sat in a booth with a man on either side of her.
Adam took a stool at the bar and ordered bourbon over the rocks. On a shelf behind the bar a TV set was bringing in a baseball game from Denver. Adam looked at it idly as he stretched out his drink and kept a close check on the front door of the place.
For fifteen or twenty minutes, only men walked in. There was, Adam concluded, an obvious shortage of available women in Perkins-particularly since the road building crew had arrived in town.
Before walking to the bar, Adam had given a passing thought to Kathy Scofield, the daughter of the woman who ran the rooming house where he was staying. Now there was a dish! Young-maybe nineteen or twenty-with wavy brown hair and a figure that almost equaled Gloria's. She had round, surging breasts, a tiny waist, and a pair of hips that could do wonders. She had smiled at him whenever they'd passed one another in the house, and the last couple of times they had stopped and chatted. She had a boy friend, however-a local buck named Tad Fuller-who was always hanging around. Well, Adam didn't blame him. Stuff as good as Kathy bore watching, especially in a town overrun with horny workmen, as Perkins was just then.
Adam figured he might get somewhere with Kathy if he wanted to carry on a full-fledged courtship, assuming he could beat out Tad and maybe a few more. But Adam wouldn't be in town long enough for that sort of campaign. In another week or so, the crew was set to move to a new base up the line.
What Adam Bales needed was a good hot piece right now. The prospects he thought glumly, were not very encouraging.
Just then, she came through the door.
She was a redhead, the shade a bit too rich looking to be real. She wore a blue-and-white candy-striped dress with ruffles on its deeply veed front which stood out nicely, and a little rope belt tied in a bow at her slender waist. The skirt flared. Below it, trim legs gleamed in sheer nylons. She stood in the doorway tentatively, looking around.
Adam required no more than a moment to make his move. He stepped over to her. From the corner of his eye, he saw another man with the same idea. The guy had left a booth where he had been sitting with two other men, and was walking toward the redhead.
"Hi," Adam said. "Can I buy you a drink?"
She looked at him, a playful light dancing in her green eyes as she touched at the fluffy bangs on her forehead. Her pink lips had a moist gleam. They parted and curved, showing white teeth. "Hi."
Her eyes shifted then to the other man and her expression hardened slightly.
The guy now stood beside Adam. He was big and rough-looking, with a belly as well developed as his shoulders. In his early thirties, he had bushy brown hair and a mean look. "Hello, Tina, baby," he said. "I've been waitin' for you."
"Hello, Tom," she said. Then she shifted her eyes back to Adam and her expression perked up again. There was no doubt in Adam's mind as to her preference. She had made it very plain.
"I'm Al Bailey," he said, using the name he had adopted since leaving Gloria. Considering the publicity surrounding his marriage, he had assumed that his real name might ring a bell even in an out-of-the-way burg like Perkins.
"Tina Dalton," she replied.
"Okay, bud, beat it!" The husky guy beside Adam said it as if he were dismissing a pesky kid, and reached in a possessive manner for Tina's arm.
"Did you two have a date?" Adam asked the girl, grinning and paying no attention to the other man.
She shook her head, which made her hair move nicely. Though obviously touched up, the red was very attractive.
Adam looked at the bruiser beside him. "The lady is with me," he said simply.
The guy's face screwed up. "Yeah? And just who the hell do you think you are, huh?"
"Tom, please!" Tina said to the man.
The tough guy's fists started opening and closing at his sides. "Well, nobody's going to start muscling in." He glared at Adam.
"Do you want to step outside?" Adam asked him, the grin still in place.
"No!" Tina said. "If you two do that, I won't have anything to do with either one of you."
By then the entire joint was watching the scene just inside the door. The two men who had been with Tom in the booth had stood and walked over to back him up.
"I suggest we let the lady settle this," Adam said, looking at Tina.
Her eyes caught with Adam's and held for a little while. Then she turned to Tom. "Some other time, huh?" she said to him.
Tina began to move towards the bar and Adam started to turn when he saw Tom bring his fist back. Moving quickly, Adam curved a left into the man's big belly, caught Tom's punch on his arm, then brought a right up to the other man's jaw. Tom stumbled backward to the floor.
Adam looked at the men who had been standing beside him but their expressions made it clear they had no desire to prolong the fight. Tom was sitting on his fat butt, rubbing his jaw and making noises.
"Is it settled?" Adam asked him.
The other man glared angrily, clambered to his feet, and turned back toward the booth where he had been sitting.
Adam took Tina's arm and they sat down at the bar.
"I didn't know there was a man in town who could handle Tom Rozier like that," she said.
"It wasn't much," Adam told her. "What will you have to drink?"
"Whiskey and soda is fine," she said.
Adam ordered it for her and a refill for himself.
"You five here?" he asked, offering her a cigarette. He lit hers and his own.
"My father runs the Dalton Trucking Company," she said. "He hauls stuff for the mines. He and mom live here; I'm just visiting."
"It's nice to meet you, Tina," Adam said.
"Nice to know you," she replied, her eyes letting him know she really meant it. "What does a guy like you do around a nothing town like this?"
"I'm working on the road job."
She said, "You're kidding!"
"No. Why, don't I look as though I could handle it?"
"You look as if you could handle anything," she said. For an instant her eyes almost gave him an open invitation. Then she laughed. "You just seem ... I don't know ... too smooth, maybe."
"Thanks ... I guess." Adam smiled.
They picked up their glasses, touched them, and sipped.
"You have a boy friend, Tina?" he asked.
"Unh-uh. I've just been here about a week from Denver. I'm going back next Saturday."
"That'll be too bad. From what I've seen of Perkins, it needs all the pretty women it can get. There's a hell of a shortage."
She laughed in a soft, mellow way. "I'm sorry that I won't be able to help out. I grew up here, of course, but small towns don't appeal to me any more-least of all, a hokey place like this." She studied Adam. "You know, I just can't get it out of my head that I've seen you somewhere else-like in Denver, maybe?"
"I've been through there," Adam said, "but it isn't likely that we met."
"You must have done lots of things besides working on a road building crew, haven't you?" she asked.
"I started out to be a business tycoon," Adam told her, "but after two years in college I realized I wasn't cut out to spend my life behind a desk. Since then I've been on the move. I've done a little of everything."
"I saw that in you right away-that college," Tina said. She was batting her green eyes at him. "You have the guts and the brains to get somewhere in this world."
"Maybe," he said. "But, right now, I'm satisfied. I do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I'm healthy-out-of-doors most of the time, plenty of fresh air and exercise."
"Crap," she said, laughing softly.
"What do you do in Denver?" he asked her.
"I'm a secretary in a wholesale hardware outfit. It's not much of a job-just a living. My dad has been wanting me to settle down here and work for him. God knows he needs somebody to straighten out that office of his, but I couldn't take it around here."
"Who's the guy I slugged a little while ago? He work for your father?"
"Yes, he does. How'd you know?"
"I guessed," Adam told her.
They chatted lightly until they had finished their drinks. When Adam invited Tina to have another, she said, "I'd rather get out of here and have some fresh air." She looked at him for a moment. "I have a car."
"Sounds good," Adam said.
Her car was a '60 Chewy convertible-bright red and it was parked by the curb. Tina handed Adam the keys.
It was a little after eight and just becoming dark as Adam guided the car up the main street, then onto a winding road which connected Perkins with several mines to the north. It was lightly traveled at that hour. They drove slowly, the wind whipping Tina's red hair.
"I like you, Al," the girl said, stating a fact which her glances had already made clear.
"And I like you," he told her. "In fact, you're the best sight I've seen in a damned long while."
"Have you had a lot of girls, Al?" she asked.
He gave her a look. "A few."
"I guessed you had. You're the type that women couldn't very well leave alone."
"You'd be surprised how many have," he said, trying to balance off her remark.
"They must have been crazy, then." She pointed to an observation turn-off at the side of the road. "Let's stop here."
He stopped, parking the car near the edge. Three or four lights twinkled at isolated points on the mountain slopes; otherwise the entire view was clothed in purple, pine-scented darkness.
Adam turned to the girl and slipped his arm around her shoulders. She lay back against him immediately. There was enough moonlight for them to see one another quite well-and also for Adam to see down the front of Tina's dress. The deep ruffled vee had opened a bit and he looked at the tops of two smooth creamy globes. She was well-stacked.
"You're not married, are you, Al?" Tina asked, turning her head to glance up at him.
"I'm not married," he said, the he coming with surprising ease.
She sighed and snuggled close to him. "I'm glad."
There was no use holding back, Adam told himself. He had registered strong with Tina Dalton and now she was waiting for him to make a play. It had happened quickly between them-almost the way it had been with Gloria, he caught himself thinking.
He cursed inwardly. One thing was for damned sure-he wasn't going to think any more of Gloria that night.
He placed his left hand at the side of Tina's face, turning it up towards him. She didn't resist. As his mouth approached hers, she opened her lips slightly.
Their lips caught and began working together immediately. Adam held his tongue in readiness, wanting to send it into her mouth but being afraid he might frighten her if he proceeded too quickly. He needn't have been concerned about that, he was to discover. In moments he felt the point of her own little tongue in his mouth, touching him anxiously. He gripped the lovely girl tighter in his arms, feeling the surge of her breasts now as her body turned towards him, and he let his tongue slide and curl against her own.
They came up for air in a little while, both of them breathing heavily. Then, without a word, their mouths joined again. This time Adam ran his tongue all around in her mouth while hers darted at it-pushing and prying and twisting. Adam felt passion mount within him. Maybe the girl didn't know it, he told himself, but she was playing with dynamite. If she didn't mean to go all the way, there was going to be trouble. Adam was in no frame of mind to stop that night. He wouldn't be able to stop. It had been too long and Gloria was too much in his guts and in his mind. He had to get rid of her, and he knew that the only way he could work her out of his system was with another woman.
Adam drew his left hand, which had been against her back, beneath her arm and to her front. Without hesitation he brought his fingers up to her right breast. They touched it, then slipped around it. He cupped the breast and squeezed. Tina wriggled and moaned deep in her throat, but she did not pull away. Adam kneaded the breast through her blouse and brassiere and marveled at its fullness and its resilient strength. It was not as large as Gloria's, but it was every bit as firm.
After working Tina's breast for a while, Adam dropped his hand to her small waist, then let his fingers trail down her thigh to the hem of her candystriped full skirt. Gently he slipped his fingers beneath her dress. They touched the lace of her slip and then its silken fabric. They went beneath that, also, and onto her nylon-sheathed leg. Adam gripped her leg with his entire hand and slowly began to work his way upward.
Their mouths parted for air again and Adam let his lips move along the side of her cheek and to her ear where he bit her lightly. Then he nuzzled the perfumed softness of her neck.
"Oh, Al ... Al...." she murmured just before he brought his mouth to hers again. Her tongue was waiting for him.
By that time his left hand had reached the top of her stocking. He felt the nylon ribbing, which was pulled taut on her thigh by a tightly cinched garter. He slipped his hand around and down the outer slope of her thigh until his fingertips rested on the other garter he found there. They inched slowly up the elastic garter strap, feeling the soft and smooth bare flesh into which the strap pressed.
Tina was moaning again and squirming. She was sitting on one hip, her upper body pressed tightly against Adam, her breasts burrowing into him. She had made not the slightest effort to restrain his hands. Now Adam was certain she wouldn't. When a girl let herself be felt that far without offering resistance, unless she was an out-and-out teaser she was prepared to go all the way.
Adam rubbed and patted the lush, warm softness of her upper thigh, bare except for the thin garter strap which passed between her flesh and his fingers. Tina had raised her leg slightly, her hip already elevated from the car seat as she sat entirely on the other one. Adam moved his hand upward, spread open against the back of her thigh.
Finally the tips of his fingers touched the edge of her pants. He went farther, his hand sliding fully onto her pants, and he cupped and held the entirety of one lush buttock. He squeezed and stroked it, enjoying the delicious give of the silken covered mound, the pants somehow seeming to enhance the exciting feel of her flesh. He let his fingertips find the cleft of her backside and then lightly trace it from the top.
Tina was wriggling with increased fervor and suddenly Adam's pulse leaped as he felt her hand drop to his lap, her fingers avid ... seeking. Adam squeezed and played with her nylon-clad buttock, patted it lightly and felt the responsive quiver, then reached all the way up to her waist and hooked his fingers around the elastic top of Tina's pants.
He began to pull her pants down and, as he did so, Tina tensed herself and raised her hips. The nylon gradually came away....
They stopped kissing now and Adam brought his right hand around to help him pull her pants the rest of the way. First he flipped the hem of her skirt high and pushed up her pink slip, baring the cream-colored loveliness of her thighs. The garter straps that crossed them were white. He reached beneath the bunched fabric of dress and slip and grasped her silken pants at the side opposite the one on which he had been pulling before. Two-handed now, he tugged the pants entirely off her hips and down her thighs. He saw the dark mystery where her legs met. He couldn't remember when anything had looked so good to him.
Moving with wild urgency, he hauled her pale pink pants down to her knees. She straightened her legs to help him take them the rest of the way. Adam carefully eased them over her shoes and let them dangle for a moment from his left hand. Then he slipped Tina's pants into his jacket pocket.
His left hand moved immediately to the upper front of her dress and he worked the white buttons below the ruffled vee. One ... two ... three of them became undone and then he pulled the ends of her thin rope belt. With both hands he brushed her dress off her shoulders.
"Al," Tina said tensely, "what if another car should drive out here?"
"They won't bother us," Adam said, too far along now to stop or even to wait. He had to have her.
Tina didn't resist as he worked her dress top down off her arms and then reached behind her for the hooks of her white brassiere. They parted and Adam took the light garment away.
Tina's breasts stood proudly, crowned with wide crescents that were a delicate shade of beige. In their centers, thick rose-beige nipples poked out and upward. Adam brushed back and forth across them with the flat of his left hand, making each boobie bounce as he touched it and making their tips assert themselves. Then he pulled alternately at each nipple with his thumb and index finger until both of them were fully erect. They were large passionate nipples. With a growl, Adam bent forward and took the right one deep into his mouth. It was hard against his tongue but the surrounding flesh was soft and yielding.
Tina's hand was pulling at him now. Suddenly her fingers groped upward toward his waist. She yanked at his belt, undoing it. Then she tore open the snaps at the top of his trousers and finally got hold of the tab on his zipper fly.
Adam released her right breast, moved briefly to her other one, then straightened up and dropped both hands to her hips. He flipped her dress and slip entirely out from under her, until all her clothes were bunched at her waist. Then, with his right hand gathering both of her softly thrusting mounds, rubbing and shaking them together, and his left hand stroking her at the lap, he bent forward once more to unite his mouth with hers. At the same time, Tina had succeeded in gaining the objective which she had been seeking and her fingers slid over and around him lightly.
They did not remain long that way. Tina began to thresh and wriggle, and finally she tore her mouth from his and gasped, "I need it now, Al. Don't tease me."
"Let's get in back," he told her.
Few cars had passed on the road which was perhaps fifty yards behind them, and none had driven out to the observation point. Adam was determined to take her there, and Tina herself no longer seemed concerned about the possibility of being observed. Each of them wanted the other so strongly that there was room for nothing else in their minds.
Tina stood up, holding her dress and slip bunched in one hand, and stepped over the back of the front seat, her bare bust jouncing delectably. Adam stripped off his jacket, then followed her over the seat and let his trousers down around his knees. Already free of the confinement of his shorts, he lowered himself to Tina's waiting body.
He touched her very lightly.
"Oh!" she cried out and lifted, at the same time trying to grasp him with her hand to help force the union. Adam pushed her hand away.
He kept touching her, prolonging the excitement of the initial contact and drawing his hips back as she surged upward.
"Damn you!" she complained, but not angrily.
He laughed softly. "Like?"
"I want it!" she said fervently.
"All right," he said, making his tone casual. Then, after hesitating just long enough, he lanced down and forward.
Breath exploded from her, then she moaned and said, "Ooooooo...."
Adam began moving, determined in spite of their excitement to make it last. Tina was more anxious. After moments of ecstatic twisting and thrusting, he pulled back. He laughed as she strained to stay entirely with him, then, just as her hips were about to fall back to the car seat again, he moved forward strongly and they tossed and rolled in tight embrace. It went on like that for minutes.
He remained in firm control as he felt Tina's body begin to tighten. Her face was passionately contorted. He pounded against her then, pushing her up and over the precipice, after which he drew back just in time to save himself. Still in union but without moving, he bent to tongue the nipples of her breasts, gathering the mounds in his hands as he did so and squeezing them so that the nipples stood high.
It wasn't long before Tina began to move again and Adam renewed his efforts. This time it was a continuous climb, gradually increasing in tempo, until their hips were crashing together, both completely unrestrained. Adam felt himself reaching the point of climax and he moved his right hand to paw roughly at Tina's tossing boobies. That heightened her excitement sufficiently to bring her even with him and, at the exact moment that he had his climax, she reached hers.
They hurtled off the peak this time together. They clutched each other's sweat-soaked body and then lapsed in utter satisfaction against the cushion of the car.
* * *
Much later that night, alone in his room, Adam tossed and turned in bed. His body no longer hungered for sex. Strangely, however, the physical satisfaction had not stopped his thinking of Gloria.
Their life together kept running through his mind. He jumped from one incident to another, as if it were all on a tape recording that played for a while, then rewound to a new point, and stopped and ran forward again.
Try as he would, he couldn't turn it off. Even the warm responsiveness of Tina Dalton hadn't been able to accomplish that.
Adam lay in the dark, smoking an endless number of cigarettes ... remembering....
SEVEN
He vividly recalled a day shortly after they had met....
They were seated very close together in the battered white Cadillac that had somehow carried them from a point north of San Francisco to Reno and, two days later, all the way down Highway 395 to Los Angeles. It was late. The rolling hills of Brentwood, decked in landscaped luxury, were quiet.
Gloria directed Adam from street to street and finally into a sweeping driveway that slashed through acres of lawn to pass in front of a rambling, dark, brick-and-stone house that looked like the country manor of an English Lord.
"You live here?" he asked her.
She turned her face pertly up to him and nodded. "It's crowded, but I think I can make room for a husband."
He brought the Caddy to a stop at the front door and then turned to her, taking her in his arms. Gloria dropped her hand to where it had been during most of their drive, having removed it from him only to point out directions after they had turned off Sunset Boulevard.
"Damn, but I'm crazy about you!" Adam said, gazing into her blue eyes.
Her hand tightened on him. "It's going to be kicks!"
"I still can hardly believe it," he told her. "It's as if I was a little kid again and dreaming about a fairy princess that suddenly appears and changes the world into a wonderland. That's what you've done to my world, Gloria."
Her eyelids almost closed and she turned her red mouth up to him, the pouting lips half-parted. Adam captured them and drank their sweetness, his arms around her now like steel bands. The delicate perfume of her made his head light.
They kissed for a long time. When Adam finally released her, Gloria was panting. "Oh, you turn me on, darling! When you hold me like that, I can't think of anything but lying on a bed and having you on top of me ... and feeling you right where I need you so."
Adam grinned at her, then craned his neck up at the huge dark house. "Me thinks this palace will have a bed, princess."
"Oh, yes," she breathed. "Let's hurry to it."
He got out of the car and, by the time he had walked around the hood, Gloria was already at the front door, opening it with her key.
"What, no welcoming committee?" Adam asked, as he peered into the still darkness.
"I'm afraid the house is all to ourselves. When I called George the other day I told him to give Charles and Betty three days off. I thought it might be better that way."
"George? Charles? Betty?" Adam grinned down at his lovely wife. "You know, you're confusing me-but sometimes that isn't hard to do."
"Silly!" she said. "George is my business manager-George Inman. And Charles and Betty are the servants."
"Only two?" Adam asked and added jokingly, "I'm disappointed. I thought I'd have to chance to boss a whole drove."
"Two is plenty," Gloria said, "even for a house of this size. Charles is the chauffeur and sort of an allround caretaker. He buttles when I give a party. Betty is cook and maid. I have a gardener, also, who lives out."
The heavy oak door had been standing open. When Gloria turned to walk into the house, Adam stopped her with a hand. She looked at him questioningly.
"Maybe it's your place," he said, softer and more seriously, "but I'm going to be the man of the house from now on. So I think it's fitting that I carry you over the threshold."
"Oh, yes, darling," she whispered.
Adam lifted her into his arms, handling her 125 pounds as if it were nothing at all-as if she were merely a doll. Gloria put both arms around his neck and held on tightly, nuzzling and kissing him as he walked into the entrance hall.
As he stood for a moment, still holding her, she whispered, "This makes me think of the very first time I looked at you. You were holding me just this way."
"Yeah," he said huskily, his lips moving next to her ear. "Little did I know...."
"Glad it happened the way it did?" she asked him.
"Glad?" he echoed. "Just point me toward a bedroom and I'll show you."
"Oh, Adam...." she breathed.
He began to carry her toward the rear of the entrance hall, hardly able even to locate the walls in the sparse light that came through the front doorway.
"You'll stumble and we'll both go to the hospital, darling," Gloria said, gripping his arm to stop him. "And that isn't where I want to spend the rest of my honeymoon. Put me down and I'll turn on some lights."
Adam tipped her, planting her carefully on her high heels, and then delivered a smart little spank directly on her lush bottom. She wore no girdle. Her curves yielded, wobbling slightly.
The feel of her was too tempting and, without giving her a chance to reach a light switch, Adam swept her around and into his arms. His mouth found hers and, as they kissed deeply, he placed both of his large hands on her backside ... palming, cupping, and rolling it.
"Oohhhhh ... darling," she murmured.
It was some little time before their embrace end ed. Then, as Gloria turned on some lights, Adam stepped to the front door and closed it.
The house was furnished in traditional style, its high paneled walls decorated with tapestries and heavy drapes, its floors covered by thick Oriental rugs. The furniture was ponderous and outsize. "It doesn't suit you," Adam said after he had looked around.
"I know it," Gloria agreed, her voice becoming a trifle wistful.
Adam looked at her. "Then, why?"
Gloria shrugged. "One of those things. It's the way a motion picture queen should live ... so they told me."
Adam stepped up to her and held her arms loosely. "I should think a motion picture queen would have the right to live the way she wanted to."
Gloria smiled indulgently. "Darling, you have a hell of a lot to learn!"
They kissed again, their tongues once more coming into play and Adam's hands roaming the length of Gloria's enticing body. Passion was running high in him. They had been on the road since morning and it was then past midnight. He was hungry for her again.
She tore away from his embrace and turned, dodging around him, half-running on her high heels to the door of the great living room, where they had been standing. Adam followed her up the pretentious staircase and down a wide upstairs hallway.
Gloria's bedroom, where she took him, was wide with multiple French windows covered by fussy curtains and drapes, a shaggy white rug, and dark walnut furnishings which included a huge high-canopied bed.
"Close the door, husband," Gloria said as she stood beside the bed and reached for the slide fastener on her dress.
Gloria came to him in her brassiere and halfslip, twining her arms around his neck and kissing him more with her tongue than with her lips. Her body pressed tightly to his. Adam used both hands to open the wide back strap of her brassiere and then he dropped his fingers to her supple waist and worked them beneath the elastic band of her slip. He stretched it out and lowered it past her buttocks and down her thighs as far as he could reach. Gloria wriggled it off the rest of the way and lifted her feet from it. Then she stood back from him and removed her limp brassiere.
"No matter how many times I see them," Adam said, gazing at her standing knockers, "they thrill me all over again-just like the first time. They're gorgeous, darling!"
"They're only for you, angel," she murmured. "Only for you to touch and kiss...."
Her nipples were half-hard already, angling out and upward. Adam, still staring, began to move toward her but she stopped him with a slender hand against his chest. "I want to undress you this time," she said. "I want to take everything off you. Mind?"
"Mmmmmmmm." He lifted her hand to his face and covered it with kisses.
She stood in front of him, wearing only peach pants over a thin garter belt and long sheer hose, and went to work stripping each article of clothing from his large, muscular frame. His sport jacket came first, then his shirt, and then Gloria opened and lowered his trousers. She got down on her haunches before him and removed each pantleg. Then, remaining in that position, she took off each of his shoes and each sock.
He expected her to rise then, but she did not. Instead she reached for the waistband of his shorts, stretched it toward her and then brought it down.
A harsh explosion of breath burst from Adam's mouth as she went to him, her eager lips loving him ... caressing, moving. In a few moments, Adam lifted her to her feet, then swept her up in his arms.
He deposited her on top of the bed, immediately bent to grasp the top of her pants and draw them away ... down her lovely smooth legs and finally to her feet where he first removed her high-heeled shoes, then picked the light pants off her toes.
Taking plenty of time, he ungartered each of her hose and drew them down and off. Then he reached beneath her arching body and unfastened her garter belt, which he tossed to the floor beside the bed. She was then entirely nude before him.
He climbed onto the bed beside her, first pressing his open lips against her belly and then working them slowly downward....
Gloria gasped and wriggled, moving her legs in wild agitation as he kissed her long and lovingly, using his tongue, after which he traced the inner slopes of her thighs.
He moved fully atop her then and bent to the high-mounding glory of her breasts, kissing each pink nipple, the aureoles around them, and then letting his open mouth roam over the entirety of each soft white breast.
Her legs were already up around him when he moved to take her and they joined with perfect smoothness. Their hips churned and thrust in unison, carrying them up the bumpy road to mutual satisfaction.
It was much later when Adam finally extinguished the lights and then returned to bed. He and Gloria found sleep together, their bodies in tender, warm embrace.
Adam blinked and sat up as the morning light streamed through the high French windows near the bed. A clock on the bedside table told him it was nine-fifteen. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the sleep which had been so deep he felt almost as if he had been drugged. But it had been marvelously refreshing.
He was alone in the bed. He called, "Gloria?" There was no answer.
He lifted a hand to his cheek and the stubble told him he was in need of a shave. Then he remembered that he had not removed his bag from the car. Well, the only thing to do, he decided, was to get dressed and go down for it, then come back for his shave and shower. He got out of bed....
As he looked around for his clothes, he saw his suitcase-the one Gloria had bought for him in Reno, as she had bought his clothes and everything else-lying on a chair. She had already brought it up from the car. Adam opened it, found his razor and shaving cream, and carried them into the huge adjoining bathroom.
He showered, shaved, and dressed in fresh clothes, including slacks and a sport shirt. Then, lighting a cigarette, he left the bedroom and walked downstairs. The house was utterly quiet.
Adam explored the first floor thoroughly, finding the dining room and the kitchen and a door which appeared to lead to the living quarters of the servants. In the kitchen there was a percolator plugged in, an amber light glowing at its base. Adam found a cup and poured fresh, fragrant coffee.
As he sipped it, he wondered where Gloria was. She hadn't told him about having anything scheduled for the day. In fact, he suddenly realized, she had told him very little about her life. Their conversation had always seemed to become sidetracked each time he asked her anything about her career. Well, he guessed that he would find out soon enough all about it.
That was the aspect of his sudden marriage to Gloria that had bothered him most-the necessity of living as a part of the movie colony but without being a member of it in his own right. Adam had rebelled at the thought of being Mister Gloria Trent, but then had convinced himself that it would be possible to adjust to it-provided he and Gloria loved each other strongly enough. One thing would be necessary above all else, he had decided, and that was that Gloria must recognize him as the head of the house and also that he immediately find some kind of work. He hadn't decided what he would do, but it would have to be something that would give him a sense of satisfaction and at least provide sufficient income to cover his personal needs. He had no illusions that he could support Gloria in the style to which she was accustomed and he certainly didn't expect her to give up her own career, but at least he could continue to support himself.
After finishing his coffee, he strolled through the center of the house and into the vast living room. It was empty. Windows at one side looked out at a rolling lawn with lush shade trees. The back wall of the room, which had been completely shielded by draperies when Adam and Gloria were there the preceding night, was now revealed as an expanse of clear glass, with a sliding door permitting access to an enclosed garden with moss, ferns, and even a tiny stream crossing it. Adam opened the door and walked to the atrium, thinking how out of place it was architecturally in an otherwise severely traditional house. A passageway on the far side led to a wide concrete patio and, beyond it, a huge rectangular pool.
Then he saw Gloria. In a white one-piece swim suit, she was stretched on a chaise lounge beneath an elaborate umbrella, talking with a short, plump man who occupied a chair beside her, his back toward the house.
Adam hesitated, wondering for a moment whether he should barge in on the scene. Then he decided he definitely should do so. After all, wasn't he her husband? He wasn't going to skulk around the house like a servant, was he?
He strode firmly across the concrete, his footsteps attracting the attention of Gloria's visitor, and the man straightened up, turned on his chair, and gave Adam a peculiarly inquisitive look.
The man was bland-faced, almost bald, had thick soft lips and a suggestion of multiple chins. He was wearing a bluish-gray plaid sport jacket, gray slacks, and a dark tie. His clothes suggested money and good taste.
Gloria's eyes widened slightly as she first saw Adam, then she smiled and said, "Darling!" She straightened up, her right hand holding the top of her swim suit whose thin shoulder straps dangled loose at her sides. Her breasts bulged extravagantly above the white suit; they were bare almost to the nipples.
"Morning, honey," Adam said, smiling at her.
"Adam, this is Max Lenhart, my agent," Gloria said brightly. Then she looked at the plump man who had risen to his feet. "Max, prepare yourself for a surprise. I want you to meet my husband, Mr. Adam Bales."
Lenhart's pale blue eyes looked like wet marbles and his mouth sagged in astonishment. He finally managed to extend a pudgy hand to Adam. "Well ... this is something, I must say. This is an event." He withdrew his hand quickly and faced Gloria. "For God's sake, Gloria, when did all this happen?"
"A couple of days ago," she said, her tone blithe. But she was looking down at her hands, having developed a sudden interest in the condition of her fingernails.
Lenhart looked at her a moment, then turned to Adam again. "Well, Mr. Bales, what do you do? I mean, are you connected with show business?"
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Lenhart."
"Adam is in construction," Gloria said firmly, her eyes rising to meet those of her agent. "Contracting. Building roads and bridges-that sort of thing."
Adam's first reaction was to laugh, but the urge was only fleeting. Suddenly he became concerned.
Why had Gloria found it necessary to say a thing like that? An impulse came upon him to blurt out, I'm a road worker; I load trucks and spread hot asphalt. But he didn't say it. His expression merely tightened and he remained silent.
"This was certainly sudden!" Lenhart's surprised countenance turned from Gloria to Adam again.
Gloria brought it back to herself with, "Adam is selling out his business up north and he's going to shop around for something down here. Isn't that right, darling?"
"Yes," he said. "My plans right now are ... indefinite."
"Well, I certainly wish you all the success and happiness in the world ... both of you," Lenhart said, his tone betraying the fact that he entertained serious doubts as to whether his wish would be realized.
"Was there anything else, Max?" Gloria asked him.
The man glanced from her to Adam and back again. "No, I believe not ... except, as I said before, I want you to give careful thought to the Steninger picture. Even though it isn't just what you've wanted...."
Gloria's expression suddenly changed and she exploded: "What I've wanted ... crap! Not only is it not what I've wanted ... not only does it miss by a country mile ... but it's not even on a par with my last two pictures, and you know as well as I do that they were dogs!"
"Darling...." Lenhart said, leaning toward her slightly and adopting a tone of studied patience. "They were box office smashes. You made a lot of money from them."
"Max, I have made it clear to you; I have told you again and again," Gloria said, her tone cold with anger, "that I am sick and tired of playing parts that require nothing of me except to walk back and forth in front of the camera and show my bust!"
"Baby...." Lenhart said soothingly, then shot a quick look of concern at Adam.
"I've had it with pictures like that," Gloria said, her voice under better control now. "Whether or not you believe it, Max, I am an actress and I want a role that will permit me to work as an actress."
"But your public, darling," Lenhart said. "They expect to see you in the type of films you have been doing-things in a light vein. Comedy has always been your forte."
Gloria laughed bitterly. "Comedy? You call the kind of mush I've been doing comedy? It isn't anything but just froth-pretty technicolor sets with me right in the middle of them, showing just about everything I have...."
"You must not be ashamed of your body, darling," Max Lenhart cautioned.
"I'm not ashamed of it. I have a good figure, and I'm proud of it, too. But I am also an actress. Max, I've studied! You know that. What was it for, if not to handle a real part some day."
"In time, dear, but right now your public...."
"The hell with my public!" Gloria said.
She was showing a side of her nature which had not been revealed to Adam in the three days he had known her. She also seemed to be showing how she really felt about her career.
Max Lenhart turned, facing Adam with a grave face. He nodded. "Happy to have met you, Mr. Bales." He began to walk across the patio.
"Max!" Gloria called after him. "Do what you can for me, will you? I mean ... really? and something else...."
The fat man stopped and turned to face her.
"I want to make the announcement of my marriage, understand? That means no tip from you to a favorite columnist."
"Yes, darling," Max said dryly and passed through the passageway to the atrium and out of sight.
"Fat little pirate!" Gloria said under her breath.
Adam sat down on the chaise lounge and put an arm around her legs, cuddling them against him. He grinned at her. "Aren't we in a temper today!"
"I'm sorry, darling," she said, melting slightly. "This is an old battle with me. Ever since I came to this stinking town I've been trying to act and, even now that I'm the number two box office draw in the country, nobody will give me a chance." Her face suddenly brightened. "Well, that's enough of that! Let's not spoil our day. Want breakfast?"
"Whenever you're ready," Adam said, "or have you eaten?"
"I don't usually eat much breakfast," she told him. "But today I'll make an exception. We are going to have the biggest platter of ham and eggs you've ever imagined." She leaned suddenly close to Adam, disregarding the top of her swimsuit to place her hands on either side of his head. She placed her lips very close to his ear and whispered, "I'm going to show you that your wife can do something besides...." She finished the sentence with a blunt lit tie word that described the principal activity in which she and Adam had engaged.
Adam laughed and tousled her blonde hair. "You goose!"
"You want to go now?" Gloria asked as she casually tugged up the swimsuit that had begun to skid off her nipples. "Or should we have a dip first? That's what I came out for, and then Max caught me."
"Sounds great," Adam said, "except that I don't have a suit."
Gloria shrugged. "Who needs one? The servants won't be back until afternoon. All you have to worry about is helicopters."
"Well, in that case, maybe I'll take a chance," Adam said, grinning.
"Just to show you that my heart's in the right place, I'll do the same," Gloria said and she quickly peeled the white swimsuit off her magnificent body.
"Your heart?" Adam echoed, staring at her in the bright sunlight. "You have everything in the right place, baby!"
"Thank you, Mister Man," she said, tweaking a hair on the massive chest that Adam was uncovering.
He reached for her, but Gloria quickly sidestepped, turned, and dived off the side of the pool, her backside looking lush, white and lovely as she arched into the water.
Adam dropped his slacks, kicked off his shoes, and got rid of socks and shorts. Then he followed his wife.
A beautiful water nymph, Gloria dived and twisted in front of him, managing to stay just barely out of reach. And barely was the right word. Adam had never been more conscious of the nakedness of her body than with the splashing water doing wild and wonderful things with her lush bosom, and her backside frequently popping into view as she surfaced and dived again.
They raced and played, with Adam succeeding in grasping Gloria for moments at a time before she was able to slip away from him. Finally, in a corner of the pool, he trapped her and the front of his body pressed urgently against her slim loveliness.
Without a word between them, Gloria gave in to him as he lifted her body into position and entered her.
The water churned and swirled around them as they gave free expression to their passionate desire, the water adding a new dimension of excitement to their mating. When it was finally over, they clung together for moments, then clambered to the pool deck and shared the huge towel that had been draped over a chair.
It was much later-after the excellent breakfast which Gloria prepared-that Adam brought up the subject which had been troubling him.
EIGHT
They were seated in the living room smoking, Gloria having put on a pair of trim capri pants the color of marigolds and a matching tunic top with thin horizontal white stripes.
Adam began it with a smile. "What the devil was the idea of that bull about me being a construction contractor?"
Gloria blinked at him a couple of times.
"I mean with Lenhart," Adam added, as if she hadn't known what he was talking about.
She looked down. "I didn't think you would mind."
"I don't really," he said. "It's none of that guy's business what I do or don't do. But I'm going to be meeting a lot of other people who know you, and I think we'd better get together and agree on a story before we go any further. It might save some embarrassment, don't you think, in case we should start talking in opposite directions?"
"Sure, darling," Gloria said.
"Why don't we just tell them that I've been in construction, without saying anything specific, and that I'm now looking for another connection."
"All right."
"That will do at least until I find a job," Adam added.
Gloria looked at him. "Find a job? What do you mean?"
Adam grinned. "I, too, do something besides...." He threw the same term back at her that Gloria had thrown at him before.
She did not smile, however. "What sort of job did you have in mind, darling?" she asked carefully.
"I don't know," Adam said thoughtfully. "I've done a little of everything."
"Tell me," Gloria responded, leaning forward with interest. "You know, it's time we learned something about one another."
So Adam sketched his life for her, through school, his hitch in the army, and the ambition that had taken him to college. He explained then, as best he could, why he hadn't been able to stick with books and lectures and why he'd had to get out into the world and discover what it was made of.
"My first job was in a coal mine, but it wasn't long before I'd had enough of that. Since then I've traveled all over the country and I've worked at everything from fruit picking to cab driving to stamping fragile on egg cartons."
"Oh, no!" Gloria laughed then.
"That wasn't the low-point of my checkered career, however," Adam told her. "For a couple of weeks, I was a bouncer at a whorehouse. It was in a town outside of Chicago. When I took the job I thought the joint was a night club. Then I found out the main part of the business was upstairs."
Gloria held his eyes with hers for a moment, then said very seriously, "I'm going to ask you the question that you asked me last night when you looked at this house-why?"
Adam grinned. "It's a simple question to ask, isn't it? But it can be tough to answer."
She waited for him to go on.
"Well...." he began, expelling a deep breath, "I really don't know what the answer is. I'm twenty-four, which is old enough, I guess, to have some idea of where I'm going and what the hell I want to do with my life. But I swear I don't have. When you met me I was still casting around."
"You started out to get a business education," Gloria said. "Doesn't the idea of going into business appeal to you any more?"
"Maybe," Adam told her. "Maybe that's what I'll eventually arrive at. Or maybe I'll even settle down with some corporation and carve out a career with them."
"Of all the kinds of work you've done, which did you like the best?"
Adam thought it over. "Construction. Even if I've had only a lowly hand in it, I get a kick out of feeling that I've helped to create something worthwhile where there was nothing at all before."
Gloria shrugged, gesturing with a hand. "That's it, then," she said. "I hit the right spot before, without even thinking. You should be a construction contractor."
"Oh, yeah...." he said dryly. "Maybe if I work until I'm fifty and save every spare cent, I'll have enough to buy the equipment that a contractor needs. Maybe by then, too, I'll have enough know-how to estimate jobs and run them at a profit."
"Nonsense!" Gloria said. "You can do it right now. As far as know-how is concerned, what you don't have you can always hire. And as for money...." She made a negligent gesture as if finances didn't matter.
"What are you getting at?" Adam asked her. "How much would it take, Adam, to set up a first line contracting outfit?"
"What sort?"
"The kind you'd like to have," she said.
"Freeway and bridge jobs have always interested me most, I guess," Adam said. "Hell, I don't have any idea of how much cold cash a man would need. I know the kinds of equipment a contractor has to have and what they cost and also what la bor costs amount to. Most new contractors use credit to a great extent, of course. As to actual cash...." His seriousness dissolved suddenly in a grin. "Well, I know one thing: it's beyond my reach and will be for a long time to come."
"I'll advance you the money," Gloria said.
Adam's eyes narrowed. "Oh, no! That's out ... definitely!"
"Darling...."
He shook his head firmly. "No. Whatever I do, it's going to be on my own."
"But you're not on your own anymore, darling," Gloria said. "We're together. Forever. For better or worse, remember? What's yours is mine and what's mine is yours."
"No, Gloria."
Her brow furrowed. "Why, for heaven's sake?"
"Because ... I could never respect myself if I took money from you."
"Oh, Adam, that's silly," Gloria said.
"Not to me," he told her. "A guy has to stand for something in this world or life is nothing but a joke."
Faint disgust marked her features as she studied him. Then she said, "We could consider it as a loan. I'd be your silent partner."
"Hah!"
"Well, what the devil's wrong with that?"
"Everything! In the first place, what would you want to invest in a construction business for? Secondly, I have no credit, nothing to recommend me for any kind of financing. We could call it a loan but what it would amount to would be a gift-a handout-and a damned big one, at that."
"But you could pay me back. You have the brains to make a go of that kind of business, and you've had enough experience at least to know the limits of your own ability and to decide what kind of help you need."
Adam said, "I think I could make a go of it, sure. But I won't have you handing the whole thing to me on a platter." , "What do you propose to do, then?" Gloria asked, her voice slightly sharp.
"Get some kind of job."
"What kind?" she pressed.
"How the hell should I know?" he retorted. Then he was quick to add, "I'm sorry, darling." His face broke into a smile. "You know, if we're not careful, this could turn into our first quarrel."
Gloria ignored his attempt to lighten the conversation and asked, "Where are you going to look first for a job, Adam?"
"Hey ... you're getting awfully hung up on this. I didn't realize I married such a practical girl."
"Adam," she said, "if there's one thing I'm not it's practical. But, whether you like it or not-whether I like it or not-I've got a kind of position I have to maintain here in Hollywood. A public image, is the way they refer to it."
"So?" He didn't grasp exactly what she was getting at.
"So...." She hesitated, watching him for a few moments, then plunged ahead: " ... I can't have a husband who's a ... a day laborer or something like that."
"That's it, huh?"
"I'm afraid that's it," she said softly, looking downward.
"Maybe you should have thought of that before you asked me to marry you," he said cruelly.
"Adam!"
"I'm sorry, angel," he murmured.
He held his arms out toward her and she left her chair to join him on the huge sofa. She came into his arms and they kissed.
"You don't regret anything, do you, Adam?" she whispered tremulously.
"Hell, no!" he said. "But, from the way you were talking, I was afraid maybe you did."
"I never will," she told him firmly. "I love you. I can't tell you how much I love you. I've just never felt this way about any man before. I seemed to know the first moment I saw you that you were the one for me. Maybe right then I was full of frustration over the experience I'd just had and maybe I wanted to strike back and do something wild, but that idea soon disappeared when I realized what kind of man I'd found. Oh, Adam, you're so right for me!"
"And you're right for me, darling. Gosh, I'm the luckiest guy alive!" Adam pulled her close to him again and they kissed for fully two minutes.
"I'll tell you what!" she said brightly, when they had settled back to sit side-by-side again. "Why don't you just take it easy for a while and think things over. Take all the time you need to decide what you'd like to do. There's no rush. Then, when you make up your mind, we'll work out something-something that will be right."
"I guess there's no big hurry," he agreed. "Aft er all, as soon as I do get a job, I can start paying you back the money you've advanced me."
"Will you stop that!" Gloria demanded. "There'll be no paying back of anything. We're married. Can't you get that through that handsome head of yours?" She reached to muss his blond hair, disheveled from the swimming pool earlier.
"We won't fight," Adam told her, smiling. "That's one thing we'll never do!"
* * *
Adam remembered the firmness with which he had said it. Little did he know then! he told himself as the mental playback stopped suddenly.
He and Gloria had fought a lot during the year they spent together. But there had been good times, too, and they didn't all have to do with sexing. In spite of their continual quarrels, there was an affinity between them that was based on mutual interest and understanding.
But circumstances were too much against them.
Then, also, there was Gloria's insecurity; her dissatisfaction with herself and with a career which had come to dominate and stifle her; her need for love and yet her inability to let Adam love her fully; her frantic running to other men when the problems of life seemed too large to face.
There must have been a lot holding them together, Adam mused, or he wouldn't have put up with her involvements with other men. It had happened two or three times during the year and each time it had hurt him in a way that was almost physical. Yet he stayed ... until the last time, the incident with Lankford. It was because he understood her, Adam guessed, and for that reason didn't blame her too much.
Not all of their troubles were Gloria's fault, either, he was now forced to admit. He had been stubborn. Perhaps he had been unreasonable. He had been frustrated, felt cooped up, his pride crushed, and he had taken it out on her. Really, though, it hadn't been entirely her fault. He saw it now.
He had married a movie star, not some little Jane Nobody who clerked in a five-and-dime store. He had gone into it with his eyes open.
It had been hopeless, and something had told him that from the very beginning. But in the storm of passion that had engulfed Gloria and him, the warning voice had been drowned out.
Now if he could only forget about her ... that was all he asked. But, they as he would, it seemed impossible. The memory playback began once more....
* * *
After six or seven weeks of lazing beside Gloria's swimming pool, Adam finally took a job. And what a job that was!
In retrospect he could almost smile about it. But at the time, it hadn't seemed funny. Not only was the job the sort that he didn't like and for which he possessed practically no qualifications, but it had been handed him on a platter.
He was hired by the Board of Governors of the Mar Pacifico Yacht Club to be its manager.
All that Adam had to recommend him for the position was a slight familiarity with boating which he'd picked up during three or four months spent in the employ of a pleasure boat company at La Tolla a short time before he and Gloria had met-that and the not inconsiderable fact that two members of the Club's Board were connected with Gloria's studio. Those two had managed to persuade another Board member, who no doubt was indebted to them in some way, and the majority of three had hired Adam for the job.
It was easy enough. In fact, that was the trouble. Since the supervision of the Club's operation had long before been reduced to a matter of routine, there was nothing much to do except to see that the records were kept in order, and to smile and make small talk with the members. For that, Adam was supposed to receive a salary of eighteen thousand dollars a year.
The job satisfied Gloria. In fact, it was the only one that she and Adam had considered which she hadn't found offensive. That was why, in desperation, he had accepted it.
It wasn't the sort of job that he could tolerate, however, and he gave it up after a few weeks. It had given him no satisfaction and he had been painfully aware that, behind his back, the snobbish members were laughing at him and calling him Gloria's boy.
After that fiasco, Adam returned to a life of ease beside the pool and tried to lose himself in several hobbies while frustration and bitterness welled up inside him.
During his short tenure at the Mar Pacifico, he made one friendship which proved to be lasting. It was with Jack La Cour, a man two or three years older than Adam who was the supervisor of maintenance. They had hit it off right away and, since leaving the Club, Adam had kept in touch with Jack, sailing with him occasionally and getting together with him and a couple of his other friends every now and then for poker.
Of all the people he met in Hollywood, Jack was the only one that Adam regarded as his own kind and the only one that he had any wish to see again. He had not called Jack since leaving town and coming to Colorado. He decided then and there to get in touch with him the next morning.
There was, however, another reason for Adam's decision, though he did not admit it to himself. He wanted to receive some word of Gloria. Jack, with his contacts at the Club, was in a position to know how Gloria had really taken Adam's departure-whether she was suffering over it or if she had thrown herself at some other man in the same manner she had thrown herself at him when her previous romance had hit the skids.
He was through with her, Adam assured himself, and he never wanted to see her again. But, still....
He lay, staring into the darkness, trying to find sleep. Finally he concluded that it was hopeless and he got up. He paced the room for a while, then lit a cigarette and stood at the window, watching the fat moon riding high above the mountains.
It was a warm night and Adam had a sudden urge to step outside. Perhaps, he told himself, a few minutes of fresh air would help induce the sleep which had eluded him.
It was with that thought in mind that Adam put on his robe, slid his feet into slippers, and moved soundlessly out of his room, down the hallway, and to the back stairs of the old frame house.
There was a fenced yard behind the house with a lawn and several pieces of unmatched outdoor furniture. The moon bathed the area in soft light and a refreshing breeze from the mountains tempered the warmth which still lingered from the preceding day, bringing with it the scent of pines and cedars.
Adam headed for a comfortable chaise lounge with chrome legs and plastic cushions, where he had sat before. It was faced the other way, an umbrella propped behind it. He was beside the lounge and about to sit down when he saw that it was occupied and the sudden awareness of someone else's presence gave him a start.
Kathy Scofield laughed softly. "I heard you leave the house," she said. "Then I peeked and saw you walking over here. I guess it wasn't nice of me to keep quiet and startle you like this."
She moved her legs to one edge of the lounge to allow Adam room to sit. He accepted the invitation.
"No harm done," he said, grinning at her. "It's good to have company. But just what the devil are you doing out here at this hour ... and dressed like that?"
Kathy-cuddly and beautiful, her brown hair caught by a pink ribbon-was wearing a shorty nightgown beneath a pink robe that had split to bare almost the entire expanse of her creamy smooth legs.
"I could ask you the same thing, you know," she told him.
"So you could," Adam admitted. "And I guess our answers would be the same, too."
"Just couldn't sleep, huh?" she asked, her tone a bit wistful. "That's right."
"Girl trouble?" Kathy inquired.
Adam gave her a look and caught the flash in her brown eyes. "Maybe," he said. "At least, that's part of it."
"Then we agree again," Kathy told him. "Except as to sexes. It's boy trouble with me."
"You and that Fuller chap?" Adam asked.
"I don't even want to hear his name," Kathy said firmly.
"Okay."
They were silent for a few moments, then Adam said, "Beautiful moon, isn't it?"
"Some people might think so."
"Come on, now-the whole world hasn't ended just because you and your boy friend had a spat."
"It's more than a spat," the girl said. "I'm through with him. He thought he could play around with every girl in the county and then come back to me, as if I was old faithful or something."
"He's a fool," Adam said.
Kathy looked closely at the big man seated beside her. "Do you really think so?"
"Damned right! With a girl like you, he was silly to look anywhere else."
"That makes my ego well again," she said. "Now, what's your story?"
"I have nobody," Adam said.
"Don't give me that!"
"It's true. There was a girl, but we weren't right for each other. Now she's a thousand miles away."
"Except that she isn't really," Kathy said.
"What do you mean?"
"You've still got her in your mind, huh?"
"I guess so," he admitted.
Kathy gave him a long look. "Maybe...." she began slowly, "you and I could sort of help one another-I mean, help each other forget."
Her remark surprised Adam, She was so young and sweet, he hadn't expected a pitch like' that. But he had long ago learned that, with women, appearances were often deceiving. The most innocent appearing girls sometimes became totally different when they were alone with a man in the dark. Also, women were peculiarly impulsive right after the break-up of an affair. He had to remember no further back than Gloria for an example of that.
Adam dropped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. He leaned closer to Kathy. "Perhaps you're right," he said.
"That was a shameless thing for me to say, wasn't it?" she asked, embarrassment now coming over her.
"I don't think so."
"It's just that ... well, I like you, Al, and...."
Adam still found it hard to get used to hearing himself called Al, particularly by a girl when they were alone in the moonlight.
"And I like you, Kathy," he responded. "You're a very lovely girl and I don't mind saying I was attracted to you the moment we met. I didn't think I stood a chance, though, with Fuller always around."
"Don't mention him, please," she said.
Adam leaned closer still and took Kathy's upper arms in a gentle grip. Her red lips were just inches away and very kissable.
"You're strong," Kathy murmured. "I think," she added softly, "that you could make a girl forget."
Adam brought her against him then and his mouth found hers. The fervor of her kiss surprised him. Her lips were warm and moist and half-open. Through her light robe and nightgown, Adam could feel the surge of her unbrassiered breasts.
When their kiss broke, she leaned back gasping. "Maybe...." she said huskily, "we shouldn't."
"Why not?" he asked. "You said yourself that we could help each other."
She looked at him, her brown eyes seeming to glow in the moonlight. She said defiantly, "Yes-why not? I'm a woman now, thanks to Tad!" The last three words were heavily tinged with bitterness.
Adam slipped a hand through the front of her robe and closed his fingers about a warm thrusting breast, covered only by the tissue thinness of her nightie.
"Oohhh...." she sighed.
He began to knead the firm globe and immediately felt its nipple rise against his palm.
"It's wrong," Kathy murmured. But, as she said it, she leaned forward, her mouth waiting for another kiss.
This time Adam clamped his mouth to hers savagely and drove his tongue as far into her as it would go. She moaned and clutched him, her own tongue responding to his ... flicking, curling, and rubbing against his. At the same time, Adam's hand went to her other breast, worked it gently, and then he squeezed her bust together, touching and teasing both of her nipples at once.
They had proceeded too far then for either of them to stop, even if they had wanted to. But neither of them did.
When their kiss ended, Adam opened Kathy's robe fully and untied the ribbon that held the top of her nightgown. It opened and he brushed the thin fabric aside so that both of her lovely boobies were bare. Her nipples were very high and very red in the moonlight.
Without another word between them, Adam dropped his hands and she raised herself, permitting him to flip her nightie up about her waist. She was not wearing the lace pants that were supposed to comprise the lower part of the baby doll set. Adam opened his own robe to expose his nakedness and then lifted her trim body until she was seated facing him, her legs on either side of his. Her eyes were closed and lips parted as Adam drew her towards him and up slightly, wriggling beneath her to achieve the exact position he desired.
They touched one another and Kathy released a small gasp. Then she moved her hips down and forward and they were fully joined. They began to move together.
In the silent moonlight they struggled slowly, each intent upon reaching a personal plateau of release and physical fulfillment which would, they each hoped, ease the frustration they had been experiencing. Adam fondled Kathy's urgent breasts, letting their fullness shake and quiver in his hands as his thumbs and forefingers gripped the upthrust red nipples.
Adam and Kathy reached their plateaus together and the achievement was satisfying, at least in a physical sense. Afterwards, neither of them had much to say and, in minutes, they returned to their rooms.
The incident had solved Adam's problem-at least temporarily. The memory playback didn't start again, and Adam went to bed and fell right to sleep.
NINE
The next morning Roy Spengler awoke with a king-sized headache, his mouth tasting as if a bear had hibernated in it.
"What a night!" he told himself, remembering. Against Gloria Trent's two thousand buck retainer, though he hadn't as yet been able to bank it, Spengler had drawn himself a cheek and had purchased a little over three hundred dollars worth of woman and booze. And he had enjoyed both to the fullest.
That had been some broad, he recalled, and she had been just as cooperative as Roy Spengler liked them. Spengler was a man of imaginative inclinations, and the wild brunette had matched him every step of the way.
He dragged himself out of bed and to the medicine chest in his bathroom where he poured three aspirin tablets from a bottle and floated them down his throat with water. He coughed, returned to the bedroom where he found a cigarette, and sat down on the side of his bed.
Adam Bales. The name registered in his mind and he centered on it. He tried to visualize the man.
As he smoked and waited for the aspirin to take hold, Spengler tried to imagine himself in Adam Bales' place. He was virtually certain that Bales had gone onto some construction job. That kind of work would be easy for him to pick up.
Spengler guessed that Bales would have gone some distance from L.A. to find himself a spot. But where? Northern California? Nevada? Arizona? Utah? Colorado? Oregon? It was a big country. , He sifted the information Gloria Trent had given him the night before and which was now filed neatly away in his brain, categorized and cross-referenced.
Spengler concluded that he had two ways to go in his investigation. He could either concentrate on the car-the Austin-Healy roadster that Bales had taken with him, whose license number he could get by placing a call to Gloria Trent at her home-or he could go to see Jack La Cour. Those seemed, at the moment, to be the only possibilities.
According to what Gloria had told him, La Cour was the only person Adam had met in Hollywood with whom he had become close-close enough for Adam to maintain contact even after walking out on his wife. And Spengler recognized the likelihood that Bales would be curious as to what was being said about his disappearance and curious, also, about his wife's reactions. It seemed to Spengler that Jack La Cour would be a logical person for Bales to call under the circumstances and that, therefore, La Cour might know where Bales could be located.
Since he assumed it would be fairly easy to check out La Cour and perhaps difficult and tim-consuming to track down Bales' car, which Bales might even have disposed of by that time, Spengler elected to contact Jack La Cour first.
After showering and shaving, he dressed, took a fight breakfast, and rode the elevator to the apartment house basement where he got into his Ford sedan. He drove up the ramp to Rossmore, then headed south. At the country club, he turned west on Beverly and settled back for the drive to Santa Monica.
Jack La Cour was tall, thin, and had the habit of squinting slightly when he looked at you. His black hair, which had receded at the temples, was in a short brush cut. Spengler found him at the dock adjoining the Yacht Club's maintenance building. He approached him in intentionally uncertain manner and asked in a hesitant voice, "Are you Mr. La Cour?"
La Cour nodded and sized up the small man standing in front of him.
"My name's Webber-Ed Webber. I don't know if you can help me, Mr. La Cour, but I'm out here from Chicago to try to locate the son of a dear friend of our family, Mrs. Laura Bales. She's very ill and she hasn't seen her boy for several years. I'm afraid that she may not pull through. That's why it's so important that I locate her son. His name is Adam."
Spengler paused and Jack La Cour studied him.
"He married that movie star, Gloria Trent. I called their house from Chicago, but couldn't get any satisfaction; that's why I flew out. I was just over there and one of the servants told me Adam was away and they weren't sure when he'd be back. I couldn't get anything else out of him.
"The only other person I knew to contact was you. Laura said her son mentioned your name in his letters." Spengler stepped closer and looked at the other man with great concern. "Mr. La Cour, can you tell me where I can reach Adam Bales?"
La Cour thought the matter over. When Adam had called him, earlier that very morning, he had made it clear that he didn't want it to be known where he was. But in a case like this....
"You live in Chicago, Mr. Webber?" La Cour asked.
Roy Spengler nodded. "Mrs. Bales has no one back there. She needs her son so badly that I flew out at my own expense to try to find him."
La Cour cleared his throat. "I can help you," he said. "Don't talk this around, but Adam Bales and his wife have separated."
Spengler feigned surprise.
"There's been nothing in the papers on it," La Cour said, "and neither of them wants the news to get out yet if they can help it. So don't talk about it to anyone, hm?"
"I certainly won't, Mr. La Cour."
"Adam is in Perkins, Colorado. He's working on a road building project there under the name of Al Bailey. He just phoned me this morning."
"I see, I see," Spengler said. "Well, I certainly do thank you, Mr. La Cour. I'll get in touch with him over there right away. Thank you, again."
Before La Cour could say another word, the small man had turned and was hurrying up the pier.
La Cour stood watching him, wondering if perhaps he had acted hastily in giving out Adam Bales' whereabouts. But if his mother was ill? La Cour knew that his mother's name was Laura-Adam had mentioned that. And his mother was indeed living in Chicago, or at least she had been the last time Adam had mentioned her. Still ... he didn't really know who the small man was, or what he was after.
Perhaps, La Cour decided, he should call Adam himself, right away, and tell him about the incident. La Cour decided that it would ease his own mind to do so.
He wiped his hands on a rag and walked up the pier to his office in the maintenance building. He sat down at his desk and picked up the note he had made when Adam had called him earlier, at home, and given him the number where he could be reached. La Cour had brought the note with him, intending to transcribe the number in the alphabetical pad on his desk.
La Cour lifted his telephone and dailed Long Distance. It took some little while for the call to be placed through to the superintendent's field office on the road project near Perkins, Colorado, and several minutes longer for Adam to reach the phone.
While Jack La Cour was waiting to talk with his friend, Roy Spengler was driving back to Hollywood, congratulating himself on his quick success in locating Adam Bales. It had been the easiest thing in the world. Well, it took a case like that every once in a while to make up for the toughies, Spengler told himself. A guy had to get the breaks sometimes.
Considering how important this case was, Spengler decided that he should not trust solely the information La Cour had given him, but should fly to Colorado and confirm that Bales was actually there.
Then he would see Gloria Trent and collect the balance of his fee-in two forms of payment. He smiled to himself in anticipation....
* * *
Adam walked slowly from the superintendent's shack, after talking with La Cour, his mind grappling with the question of who the man that had been asking questions about him was. Adam didn't owe money to anyone in California, or anywhere else for that matter. It had been some gossip hound, he concluded, or else somebody working for Gloria.
He asked himself if Gloria would actually go to the length of having him traced. Perhaps she would, he decided.
Well, there was only one thing for him to do, Adam told himself, and that was to meet the guy when he arrived in town and head him off-that was assuming, of course, that he came to Perkins. Adam guessed that he would. A detective, if that was who the man was, wouldn't be likely to accept hearsay evidence; he would want to confirm that Adam was actually where Jack La Cour had said he was, before reporting back to his client.
Adam stepped up to Barney Maples, the crew foreman, who was standing with a roll of prints in his hand, looking out across the job. "Barney, something's come up-a personal matter. I'll have to ask for the rest of the day off."
"What?" Barney roared, turning to face him.
"Sorry," Adam said. "I have to get back to town."
"See here, Bailey," the foreman said, "you know I'm short-handed as it is."
"I said I'm sorry. There's just nothing I can do about it."
Barney Maples made a face of resignation. "Okay. Get the hell out of here. But you'd better be on the job first thing in the morning."
"I will, Barney."
Adam turned and headed for the open area a short distance up the road, where he had parked his Healy roadster.
He assumed that the man who had talked to Jack, whoever he was, would fly to Denver and take a bus from there to Perkins. Adam seemed to recall having heard that the only bus arrived at a little after three o'clock. Considering the distance from Denver, Adam assumed that the bus left the city at about one. It was very possible, of course, that the man would not be able to fly from L.A. to Denver immediately and, as a consequence, wouldn't arrive in Perkins that day. Adam was gambling, however, on the likelihood that the guy would be anxious to follow up the lead La Cour had given him and that he might also be concerned that La Cour would call Adam and tip him off, which was exactly what he had done.
Adam was not angry with his friend for having divulged his whereabouts. Under the circumstances, what else could La Cour have been expected to do? He couldn't have known that Adam's mother was acquainted with no one named Ed Webber and that Adam had, in fact, spoken with his mother by telephone just two days before and had found her in excellent health.
Adam had considered the desirability of packing his things and taking off for a new locale. But he didn't want to do that. Hell, why should he run? All he wanted was to be left alone. It didn't bother him if Gloria knew where he was, so long as she didn't come after him. So he would have a little talk with this alias Ed Webber, whoever he was, and set him right. Adam would make it very clear that he didn't want to be bothered.
Though the closing of the book on his marriage to Gloria had proved more painful than Adam had expected-and he was sure the pain was not yet over-he was determined that the book should remain closed. He had gone this far and he would see the thing through. He and Gloria were not right for one another. Regardless of their compatibility in bed and the tender feelings which, in spite of everything, he still had for her, Adam would not put himself back on the torture rack again. Gloria wasn't worth that. No woman was.
He drove into town feeling, as he usually did when he was in the Healy, that he had no business keeping the car, since Gloria had paid for it, even though it had been a birthday present to him. But he had taken it and kept it anyway. He needed a car and he didn't have the money right then to buy one, so he had rationalized to himself that he was entitled to salvage something from the last year.
He zipped up the main street of Perkins, then slowed and signaled for a turn onto the street where he lived, only to have his attention distracted by Tina Dalton, who was getting into her Chewy convertible at the curb in front of the drugstore.
"Al!" she called, smiling and waving at him. "I want to talk with you."
He grinned at her and wheeled over to the side, parking the Healy in front of her own machine. He jumped out and met her on the sidewalk.
"Hi," she said brightly, walking up to him. She was dressed in a white sleeveless sheath that made her look like a million dollars. Her red hair gleamed lustrously in the sun.
"Morning, Tina," he said, taking her hand.
"Sleep well last night?" she asked softly, coming up close to him. There was a naughty gleam in her eyes.
Adam remembered the preceding night-how he hadn't been able to sleep until after his back yard rendezvous with Kathy Scofield. But that hadn't been Tina's fault.
He grinned at her and said, "Just great. You?"
She closed her eyes momentarily and said, "Mmmmmm...."
Well, he told himself wryly, there was nothing like a satisfied sex partner!
"Al...." She put a slim finger against the front of his shirt and began tracing a meaningless design. "How about having dinner at my house tonight? I'd like you to meet my father."
Oh, no, he told himself. She wasn't going to turn serious on him! And so soon, too.
"Well, Tina...."
"Now, no arguments," she said quickly. "This might prove to be very worthwhile for you. I can't say any more now, but please tell me you'll come. About seven?"
Adam looked at her for a few moments. The seriousness in her green eyes convinced him that he couldn't very well turn her down. "Okay," he said finally. "Seven it is."
"Wonderful," she smiled and squeezed his arm before turning back to her car. "See you later." She threw him a wave over her shoulder. "Goodbye, Tina."
Adam got back into his own car and drove thoughtfully to Mrs. Scofield's rooming house. It seemed that things were piling up on him.
After showering and changing clothes, Adam walked down the main street to Miller's Drug Store where the bus from Denver stopped. The man at the prescription counter confirmed that the only bus that day would arrive at 3:09. Since Perkins was not served by a railroad, the detective who had talked with Jack La Cour (if that's what he was) would be on that bus, Adam told himself, unless he had elected to lose a day in following up the lead La Cour had given him ... or unless he had rented a car in Denver, in which case he might breeze into town at any time.
Adam didn't think it likely that he would go to the expense of a car rental, however. The bus would be the most practical way to get there.
Adam sat down at the drug store fountain for a cup of coffee, then strolled back to his rooming house, thinking about how he should approach the man and what he could say or do to convince him, and whoever had sent him, that Adam wanted to be left alone.
Gloria was behind it, Adam was sure.
Gloria was really hung up on him. She had made that abundantly clear during the year of their marriage, in spite of their continual quarreling and her sorties with other men. She had something with Adam, he knew, that she had not found with other men.
And he had found something with her, too.
There was no doubt that they loved one another, but that didn't alter the fact that the marriage was no good and that he could not afford to return to her. If she were not a celebrity, or if he were somebody in his own right, the picture would have been entirely different. Or, even being a celebrity, if she were more secure about it in her own mind instead of being such a child....
What was the use of hashing over the thing, he finally asked himself. There was simply no future for them and that was that!
What he should do, Adam decided, was to get himself so thoroughly involved with another woman-say Tina Dalton, for instance-that he would have no room in his thoughts for Gloria any more. Suddenly he was very glad that he had bumped into Tina that day and that she had invited him to dinner.
TEN
The ten-year-old bus rumbled and lurched along the two-lane road that wound through the mountains to Perkins and points south. Roy Spengler sat beside a window, dividing his thoughts between the business matter that had brought him on this junket and the uncovered knees of the girl who sat beside him.
She was only a kid, perhaps sixteen or so, but she had good knees-smooth and round and dimpled. She also had a good set of boobs. They jiggled up and down in her white blouse whenever the bus hit a particularly rough spot in the road.
It wouldn't be long, Spengler told himself, before he'd have himself some of the best woman flesh in the world-Gloria Trent. Yeah, if Adam Bales were really hiding out in the jerkwater town ahead, as that guy La Cour had said he was, then Spengler had only to fly back to L. A. and tell Gloria he had found her wandering hubby. She would want to know right away where he was, but Spengler would say, Not so fast, baby. Maybe then, he told himself, he would slip an arm around her and take hold of one of her big bursting knockers and say, You and I have a little settlement to work out before I slip you the information. He laughed to himself, barely able to restrain the impulse to lick his lips.
It would really be something when he got Gloria Trent down on a bed, he assured himself. Yeah! His mind proceeded to consider all the things he would do to Gloria until he had to exert a conscious effort to sidetrack his thoughts. Perkins was just ahead, and it wouldn't do, he told himself, to step off the bus the way he was just then.
As they drove up the main street of the town, Spengler looked it over in disgust. How the hell could people live in an outpost of creation like that?
The old bus snorted to a stop, its door opened, and Spengler stood up to follow the behind of the cute girl who had sat next to him, as she made her way up the aisle. Spengler followed her to the sidewalk, the two of them being the only passengers to Perkins that day, and the bus closed its door and moved on.
The detective had no more than glanced a couple of times around him and turned, attache case in hand, in the direction of the town's only hotel, when Adam emerged from the drug store where he had been seated at the fountain watching the bus' arrival through the store's front window.
"Hey ... wait a minute!"
Spengler turned and immediately recognized, from a picture Gloria Trent had shown him, the man who had called out.
"Do I know you?" Spengler asked, looking Adam over, not wanting to give himself and his mission away.
"You should," Adam said. "You came to town to find me, didn't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Spengler told him.
Adam gestured toward the drug store. "Let's step in there for a cup of coffee and talk about it, hm?"
Spengler squinted at the big, blond man, not sure how he should play it. He hadn't intended to talk with Adam at all. He had meant only to make some discreet inquiries, find out where Adam was working or where he stayed, and hang around until he had spotted him. Then, without doing anything to tip Adam off, he had planned to head back to Denver on the next bus from where he would jet to L. A. Now he assumed that La Cour had called his friend that morning and Bales had put two-and-two to get her. But Bales couldn't be sure that Spengler was the one who was looking for him. Therefore, he decided, the best bet was to continue to deny any interest in Bales and perhaps, by doing that, convince Bales that he was the wrong man.
"I don't mind having coffee with you," Spengler said, smiling slightly, "but I still don't know what the devil you're talking about."
"Come on, now," Adam told him. "You can't make that stick. Jack La Cour called me. I know you're the one who went to see him this morning and spun him a wild yarn about my mother being sick. I knew you'd be arriving on that bus today."
Spengler looked at him. You've got me all wrong, buddy. My name's Cross and I'm in town to sell some mining machinery."
"Who are you here to see?" Adam asked, his eyes twinkling. He knew the names of most of the wheels at the local mines.
"I think that's my business, isn't it?" Spengler asked.
"No, I don't think it is," Adam said. "I don't think that's your business at all." He paused. "If your name is Cross, show me some identification."
"See here now," Spengler flared, "just who are you? I've had enough of this crap!"
"So have I," Adam responded pleasantly. He nodded his head in the direction of the drug store. "Let's have that coffee, what do you say?"
Spengler shrugged and walked into the drug store with Adam, who led him to a table in back by the wall-far enough away from the other customers so that their conversation couldn't be overheard.
"Now, just who are you working for, anyway?" Adam asked. "Gloria?"
"I don't know what...." Spengler began.
"Can it! If you were really a salesman, you'd have shown me some identification and got me off your back right away. Also, if you didn't have any interest in me, you wouldn't have walked in here."
"Hell," Spengler said, "I was just curious to...."
"Knock it off!" Adam told him. "I've called your bluff. Admit it."
Spengler gave him a long look, read complete certainty in the other man's eyes, then sighed. "Okay, Bales."
"That's more like it," Adam said. "Only around here I'm Al Bailey. Didn't La Cour tell you that?"
"Yeah," Spengler said dryly.
The detective was afraid now that one of two things would happen-either Bales would head out of town before Spengler could put Gloria Trent in touch with him, or else Bales would see that it was hopeless to try to hide out and would get in touch with Gloria himself. That would be worse, as far as Spengler was concerned; it would louse up his plans for Gloria completely.
A young waitress walked over to their table and Adam ordered two cups of coffee.
"What's your name?" Adam asked Spengler, lighting a cigarette.
Spengler told him.
"Now," Adam said, "what's the pitch?"
"No pitch. Somebody just wanted to know where you were, that's all."
"My wife, hm?"
Spengler nodded, measuring Adam's, reaction.
There was practically none-just a slight look of resignation.
"What are you going to do about it?" Spengler asked. "Go back to L. A. and see her?"
"Hell, no," Adam said.
Spengler brightened. "Then what?"
The coffee came and Adam waited until the girl had walked away before answering.
"You have a big fee riding on this?" Adam asked.
"Big enough," Spengler said, wondering what he was getting at.
"Maybe I could match it. The Austin-Healy I'm driving would bring a good price in Denver."
"Yeah? Go on."
"I want to make it worth your while to go back to L. A. and tell Gloria that you don't know where the hell I am."
Spengler thought it over. He wouldn't have to actually take any money from Bales-that kind of double dealing would get him into trouble. But he could make Bales think he was going to and stall him somehow. Maybe, that way, Bales would stay in Perkins until Spengler could get back to Gloria and Gloria could reach her husband.
The detective realized that he shouldn't appear too eager to accept an unethical offer of that sort, however. "You know what you're asking me to do, Bales ... I mean, Bailey?" he asked.
Adam nodded.
"I could lose my license."
"So, who'd know?"
Spengler appeared to be thinking it over. "Would a thousand bucks turn the trick?" Adam asked.
"I've already gotten twice that much from your wife as an advance," Spengler said, figuring it was a good idea to make Adam think he would have to raise a pretty large sum. That would take him a little time, Spengler figured.
"You guys charge big for an easy job," Adam said.
"Maybe if you were to pay me twenty-five hundred ... spot cash," Spengler suggested.
Adam thought it over. That was a hell of a lot of money. The Healy would probably bring that much, all right, but then he'd be without transportation. Except for the car, he had practically nothing. Adam wondered if it would really be worth it. Maybe the smartest thing would be to fly to L. A. and have it out with Gloria-hell, didn't he trust himself to face her again?
"Why does Gloria want to locate me?" Adam asked, fishing. "She could get a divorce without knowing where I am. I deserted her. She could get a decree on a default."
"Maybe a divorce isn't what she wants," Spengler told him.
"What, then?"
Spengler shrugged. "Clients don't tell me everything."
Suddenly Adam got an idea. "I think that what she's really worried about," he said, "is the publicity when word gets out that I left her. That would kind of destroy the illusion of her great sex appeal, wouldn't it?"
Spengler smiled nastily. "Is it an illusion, Bales?" he asked. "Tell me."
"Cut out that stuff!" Adam said.
"No offense," Spengler told him.
The more Adam thought about it, the more strongly convinced he became that he was in a good bargaining position. He said, "There's been nothing in the papers about Gloria and me separating, but she can't keep it quiet forever. What she'd like, I'll bet, is to get me back to L. A. and try to make it look as if she was the one to insist on the separation. I could throw the whole thing into a cocked hat any time I wanted by calling in some reporters and telling them that I'd left her when I found out neither she nor Hollywood were what they were cracked up to be."
"You'd do that?" Spengler asked, looking at him closely.
"I would ... if that was the only way out," Adam said, not meaning it. He could never actually bring himself to treat Gloria that way. But if she thought he would, Adam figured it might get her and the detective off his back.
Spengler said, "Look, why don't you let me have a talk with Gloria-I mean, Miss Trent. I'll tell her what you said and we'll see what she wants to do about it."
A flash of suspicion crossed Adam's mind. "You gave up pretty easy on that extra dough you wanted to get from me," he said.
"I didn't ask you for that, Bales," Spengler told him. "You were the one who wanted to make that kind of deal. Actually, you couldn't pay me enough to make it worth my while to double-deal a client. I stand to get a lot more from your wife, as it is."
"You're a robber," Adam said, feeling a sudden twinge of compassion for Gloria.
Spengler retorted, "Let's not be nasty."
Adam sipped his coffee.
"Well, what do you say?" Spengler pressed. "You sit tight while I get in touch with your wife and see what we can work out, hm?" This was just what Spengler wanted. He had no intention of trying to work out any deal between Gloria and her husband. He merely wanted to hold Adam in Perkins for a couple of days.
"Okay," Adam said. "Tell her that if she'll leave me alone, I'll let her give out any kind of statement she wants about our separation and that I'll even confirm it. Otherwise, I'll say something she won't like at all."
Spengler stood up. "All right, Bales. Thanks for the coffee."
"When will you be in touch with me?" Adam asked, dropping some coins on the table and getting up to follow Spengler from the place.
"Oh ... a day or so."
"Why so long?" Adam asked. "You can phone Gloria right from here, can't you?"
"Something like this can't be handled by phone, Bales," he said, when they had reached the street. "I'll want to fly back and see her in person. The next bus to Denver doesn't come through here until morning."
"Well, you can reach me at Mrs. Scofield's rooming house when you have the answer," Adam said, turning to go.
"Sure thing," Spengler told him. "I'll be in touch." The detective started down the street to the hotel, smiling to himself in satisfaction.
* * *
Mr. and Mrs. Perry Dalton lived in a large frame house just off the main street of Perkins. In the early days, it had been one of the town's finest residences, and it was still one of the most pretentious. The Daltons had bought it shortly after moving to Perkins to establish the trucking company which had since become the leading means of transport to and from the mines in the area. Since his first day in Perkins, Adam had seen the Dalton trucks almost everywhere he looked, hauling ore and machinery to town and back and on the road between Perkins and Denver.
Perry Dalton was a round little man with quick dark eyes, a hearty voice, and an energetic, friendly manner. His wife was taller and, in her mid-forties, showed traces of having once been a very beautiful woman. It was clear that Tina had inherited her beauty from her mother's side of the family.
At first Adam felt ill at ease in the company of the couple whose daughter he had met only the night before and then had promptly seduced in the moonlight. But the uneasiness quickly melted in the warmth of their reception of him. It was clear that, in just that one day, Tina had talked a lot about him and it seemed to Adam that what she'd said must have gone deeper than the usual talk of a daughter about a new boy friend.
After dinner the women disappeared, leaving Perry Dalton and Adam in what had doubtless been known, in the house's early years, as the parlor. Dalton offered Adam a cigar, which the young man smilingly refused in favor of one of his own cigarettes. Dalton lit his cigar, blew out a huge gust of smoke, and began to talk:
"You know, it's made Martha and me real happy to have Tina with us the last week or so. Now that she's living in Denver, we hardly ever see our little girl any more. The wish that's been dearest to our hearts is that some day she'd move back here to Perkins with us."
"I know what you mean, sir," Adam said.
"I really need her help at the office, too," Dalton went on. "Of course, that's not all I need around there." He seemed suddenly to have become more intent as he fastened his small, bright eyes on Adam. "I need a man to help me-a young man to work into the business." He paused and cleared his throat. "Tina tells me that you had a business education, Al."
"Well, sir, I took two years of college majoring in business administration. But that's not much of a background, I'm afraid."
"I don't know," Dalton said. "With the practical experience you've had on construction work and other jobs where you haven't been afraid to use your back and your hands, plus the college stuff, you might be just the kind of man I've been looking for.'"
Perry Dalton's statement almost floored Adam. He had certainly been expecting nothing like that. Tina, he told himself, was one hell of a fast worker. When she fixed her sights on a guy, the joker didn't stand much of a chance.
"But you don't know anything about me, sir," Adam protested.
"I know enough," Dalton aid. "After Tina tok me about you, I took the liberty of phoning Russ Cone." (He referred to the superintendent on the Ridgeway Road project.) "Russ told me that your work record with him has been very good. It seemed to Tina," Dalton went on, his eyes narrowing slightly but still carrying a twinkle, "that you were a young man who could do a lot more than just shovel rocks on a road job. Since meeting you, I'm inclined to agree with her."
"Well, thank you," Adam said hesitantly. "It just might be, though, that I like the kind of work I've been doing." Adam put on a friendly grin to ease the bluntness of his words.
Perry Dalton waved a hand at the air. "It may be that you do. I used to like that sort of life myself. But we all have to think of the future." He hesitated. "If you think the trucking business might interest you and if you'd care to give it a try, I'm prepared to put you on right now. We can call it a trial on both sides. After a month or six weeks, if either of us isn't satisfied, we can call it quits with no hard feelings."
The two men looked at one another for a few moments, and then Dalton went on: "There's one other thing, too. If you accept the offer, Tina has agreed to give up her job in Denver and move down here to help out in the office. How does that sound, Al?"
Adam didn't know what to say. It was clear that Tina was really gone on him. Well, he liked her, also, and he had just that morning told himself that the best thing in the world would be for him to become serious with Tina, or some woman, in order to get Gloria out of his system. But this was happening so fast....
Then there was something else to consider, also: he had told Tina he was not married and she knew him by a phony name. Though he never expected to see Gloria again and he was sure that their marriage would soon be dissolved, it still might make a difference to Tina when she learned the truth about him. If the truth itself didn't bother her, the fact that he had lied about it probably would.
"Well, what do you say, Al?" Perry Dalton asked, smiling.
"It ... sounds like a wonderful offer, Mr. Dalton, and I'm really very flattered," Adam said. "I'd like to have a little time to think it over, though. It comes as kind of a surprise."
Dalton laughed. "Sure. I understand. Take a day or two; think it over carefully. No doubt Tina will try to help you make up your mind." Dalton winked. "In the few days she's known you, you certainly have made a big hit with her, Al. I've never heard her talk about any other young man the way she's raved about you."
So Tina had told him they'd been seeing each other for several days, just to make it sound better. That little minx, Adam thought.
"When the right time came, Tina and her mother appeared in the living room, the young girl announcing that there was a good movie at the local theater if "someone" would care to take her. As she said it, she looked right at Adam and there was laughter all around.
So he took her to the movie.
They sat close together, held hands and munched popcorn. Later they parked on a dark road just outside of town and necked. Though Adam had no doubt he could go all the way with her as he had done the night before, and that she was probably hoping he would, he held himself under strict control. In view of the circumstances-her father's offer and all-he didn't think it would be right, at least not until he had clarified some things with her. And he wasn't ready to do that yet.
Adam wasn't ready, at that particular time, to face up to anything. The more he thought about it, he was even becoming unsure of his attitude toward Gloria.
Life had suddenly become very complicated.
After taking Tina home, he drove down the street to The Mine Shack and sat at the bar until closing time, nursing a couple of highballs.
ELEVEN
The first thing Roy Spengler did after arriving back in Los Angeles the next afternoon was to phone Gloria Trent. He reached her at-home, at the private number she had given him. After telling her he had some important news, she invited him right over, her reluctance to have him seen at her house having apparently faded in her anxiety to receive word of Adam.
She met him personally at the front door, wearing a powder blue sheath dress that made a tantalizing display of her figure, and led him into the large living room. She closed the door and took a chair across from him, slipping one shapely leg over the other in a pose which her skirt's fashionable shortness turned into an extremely provocative view.
Spengler saw the tightly pulled top of one of her stockings and later, when she shifted her position slightly, an exciting flash of bare thigh above it.
Again he told himself, as he had on the occasion when he'd first met the woman, that she was a tremendously desirable female. And the time had come, he was sure, for him to have her. He was certain that in just minutes all of her loveliness would be his.
"Well, Mr. Spengler," she said, "what is it? Don't tell me that you've located my husband already?"
He smiled and took his time in answering, letting the suspense build. Then he said, "As a matter-of-fact, I have."
Gloria's lush lower lip dropped in an involuntary expression of surprise which also was very provocative sexually. Excitement lighted her blue eyes. "Where is he?" she demanded tensely.
Spengler cleared his throat, the smile still glued to his sly face. "Not so fast, Miss Trent. I've located him; I've seen him; and he's close enough for you to reach him tomorrow, if you wish."
"Where is he?" she repeated.
"First," Spengler said, "There's the matter of settling my fee."
"Yes ... yes...." She waved an impatient hand. "I'll see that you're paid."
"Very well," Spengler said coolly. "I told you there would be an additional thirteen thousand, but I didn't anticipate that I could find your husband so quickly. Naturally, I don't want to hold you up. So I'm going to scale down my fee. I'll accept an additional three thousand dollars cash ... and you."
Gloria's expression changed, her eyes narrowing. "What did you say?"
"I said, Miss Trent-Gloria-that I want you." Spengler continued to smile at her as if he had merely made a comment on the weather.
"That's absurd!" she flared. "Are you out of your mind?"
"A little, perhaps-with desire for you," he said, his voice dropping slightly. "But, otherwise, I think that I'm quite sane."
"Well, I certainly won't do it," Gloria told him firmly.
"Then I won't tell you the whereabouts of your husband," Spengler responded and stood up.
"This is preposterous!" Gloria exploded.
"I don't think so," Spengler said calmly, turning toward the door.
"I can have your license taken away," Gloria said.
"But you wouldn't," Spengler retorted, not looking at her. "The one thing you don't want is to make our dealings public." He turned and faced her, standing in front of the closed door. "Do you?" he demanded sharply.
"No," she admitted.
He shrugged. "Then let's not play games."
"You are a dirty little bastard," she said with studied hatred.
Spengler laughed. "Call me anything you like. You may call me more than that before we're through. But you'll do what I say."
"How do I know you've found Adam?" she asked him. "Have you any proof?"
"If you mean, have I brought you a lock of his hair or something like that ... no. I'm afraid you'll just have to accept my word."
"Your word!" she scoffed.
Spengler laughed again. "In spite of my desire for you, I can assure you that I'm trustworthy-at least, as far as my profession is concerned. I know exactly where your husband is."
Gloria looked at him a long time, then leaned silghtly forward. Her voice was carefully controlled when she said, "Mr. Spengler, come back and sit down, won't you?"
"Sure," he agreed. He strolled back to the sofa which he had previously occupied.
"I forgive you for what you said," Gloria told him. "Yours isn't the only crude proposition that's been flung at me since I came to Hollywood. So we'll forget about it, shall we? Now, how much money do you want in settlement?"
"I want exactly what I told you, Gloria," the small man said. "No more and no less. Actually I'm giving you quite a break. But I insist on having you; otherwise there's no deal. You can hire yourself another detective, but I guarantee that he won't be able to follow the trail I found. The trick I used can't be worked again."
"You're serious about this, aren't you?" Gloria asked, the loathing very evident in her voice.
"You're damned right I am!" Spengler told her. "I don't have to tell you what a desirable woman you are. You've been told that by guys whose opinions you value more highly than mine. Okay. So all I need to tell you is that I'd figure it the crowning achievement of my life to bed you. Now that I've got the chance, I'm not going to let it slip by."
Gloria looked at him for a few moments as if she didn't know what to say. Then she replied, "I'll give you the full thirteen thousand dollars, Mr. Spengler.
That's what we agreed on. You can buy a lot more of what you want with that than you could ever get from me."
"More maybe," Spengler said, the nasty grin reappearing on his face. "But not of the same quality. As crazy as it sounds, a few minutes with you is worth ten grand to me. That's the kind of guy I am. But you don't have to accept the proposition. Say no, I'll walk out of here, and that will be that."
"You really would, wouldn't you?" she said.
He nodded, his eyes telling her he meant it.
She said, "You are a bastard!"
He laughed.
Gloria stood up. "All right, I'll give you what you want. But I'll be hating you every minute. Will that make you enjoy it?"
"Don't worry," Spengler said with quiet confidence. "I'll enjoy it."
"When?" Gloria demanded harshly.
Spengler said, "Right now."
"Here?"
"The floor is fine," Spengler told her. "The floor?"
Spengler shrugged. "Then take me up to your bedroom, if you don't care what the servants think."
"There's the sofa," Gloria suggested.
Spengler shook his head. "I prefer the floor. There's more room."
Gloria glared at him, as if she were trying to exterminate him with her eyes.
"Let's get to it, shall we?" Spengler asked. "Stand in front of me and undress. And please do it slowly."
"You are the vilest, filthiest...."
A bored look came over Roy Spengler's face.
"Come off that, Gloria! You've done this sort of thing before and don't tell me you haven't. Maybe I'm a little more direct than some of the Hollywood big boys, but our minds run along the same track. You couldn't have got as far as you have without putting out to more than a couple of jokers along the way."
"What I have or haven't done is certainly no concern of yours," she told him coldly. He shrugged again. "Okay. Just strip." She looked at him closely. "If you're putting me on-if you haven't really located Adam-so help me, I'll see that you pay for this!"
"Don't worry, baby," he said. "I've located him. I know right where he is."
She studied him for several moments and then her hands slowly lifted and reached around to the slide fastener at the back of her neck.
This is it, he told himself. I'm actually going to have Gloria Trent!
Gloria started the zipper, then changed the position of her hands and worked it the rest of the way to the end of its track, which was below her waist. She shrugged the top of the dress off her shoulders and it fell forward, revealing her full white brassiere. Gloria carefully avoided the eyes of the small detective, as he sat a few feet in front of her with crossed legs and watched her disrobe. She let her dress down the rest of the way, then lifted each trim leg and stepped from it. Her lace-bordered half-slip was white and quite short, its bottom edge hitting well above her knees.
Without hesitation and still without looking at Spengler, Gloria slipped her tapering fingers beneath the elastic band of her slip, at each side, and let the slip down over her hips, thighs, and then off.
She wore white nylon pants that were brief and very sheer and without any adornment, their elastic waistband biting into the soft flesh just below her navel. Beneath her pants a thin garter belt was visible, the garters extending downward to tug .the tops of her long, very sheer hose.
Gloria, her face set in a severe mask and her eyes still avoiding Spengler's, reached for her pants next, intending not to prolong the tease but to complete her disrobing in as quick and efficient a manner as possible. Spengler stopped her with a sharply uttered, "No!"
She looked at him for the first time since she had begun disrobing. "Well, what is it?" Her fingers lingered at the waist elastic of her pants.
"The bra first, honey," he said, leering.
"I guess I can undress any way I please," she snapped back at him and began to tug the top of her pants down. Now almost all of her white belly was bare.
Spengler shook his head. "Do it my way, baby, or you won't get what you want from me."
Gloria's eyes narrowed again as she stared at him. "You are, without doubt...."
"Please," Spengler said with feigned weariness. "No more of that, hm? It's become boring."
Her face flushed with anger, Gloria raised the waist elastic of her pants and reached quickly behind her back, unhooked her brassiere, and brought the light garment down her arms and away.
Spengler pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he saw her lush bare breasts for the first time. He had never seen a pair that were so perfect. "Wait!" he ordered. "Just stand there."
"I will not!" Gloria exclaimed, shielding her bosom now with one arm. "If you think I'm going to make a deliberate display of myself for a vicious, nasty-minded...."
Spengler laughed. "You've done it for the foreign versions of your films," he said. "If you were willing to show your jugs to half the world, why not to me?"
Gloria looked at him for a moment, her face still livid, then drove her hands straight down to her sides in a gesture that made her suddenly unshielded breasts quiver.
Spengler kissed them with his eyes.
Gloria put her shoulders back and pranced in a circle before him, the large, out-thrust and tip-tilted breasts jouncing delectably with each angry step. "Does that please you?" she demanded at last, her tone corroded with sarcasm.
"Very much so," Spengler told her. "Now sit down and take off your stockings."
She sat on a chair, threw one fully tapered leg over the other, and snatched at the garters that held up her hose. She drew first one nylon away and then the other, stripping them off her toes together with her high-heeled shoes. She stood, tugged the thin garter belt up from beneath her pants, and threw it to the floor. She then wore but the single brief garment.
Once more Stengler stopped the strip tease with a word and he stood up in front of her. "Undress me, now," he said.
"I will not!" Gloria stated firmly.
"You will," he responded with a confident leer.
The man and woman faced one another for several moments, neither of them speaking, and then Gloria stepped forward and began to do as he had ordered. She took off his jacket first, then his tie, his shirt, and his trousers. He wore an undershirt and Gloria had to step very close to reach around his body and draw the garment up-so close that the tips of her large erect breasts touched him and, as she moved, drew little designs on his chest.
Spengler pressed the woman down in front of him then and made her unlace and remove each of his shoes and then his socks, after which he let her rise to shuck off his shorts.
He stood in front of her entirely naked and she wore only her nylon pants.
"Turn around," he said to her, his voice hoarse.
She turned.
As soon as she had faced fully away from him, he said, "Stand there." She stood still.
Gloria Trent's backside was as thoroughly enticing as were her breasts. It was richly curved and, at the same time, firm. Her buttocks were so extravagantly rounded that Gloria's brief and very light pants could not quite contain them. The almost transparent nylon was pulled very tight and a bit of each cheek was revealed below the elastics of her pants.
Spengler stared at the sight, branding it into his memory, then finally he moved forward and reached for the waistband of Gloria's pants. His fingers curled around it, stretched it towards him, and then he gave a vicious tug and the pants tore-the elastic popping and the nylon splitting on each side. He tugged again and Gloria's pants pulled completely off of her. She was then as nude as he.
"Now," he said, his voice almost choked with lust, "lie down ... on your belly."
Gloria whirled to face him, her full breasts tossing. "No!" She almost screamed the word.
"Do you want the servants to hear?" he asked, enjoying her look of dismay.
As she continued to stare at him, her bare breasts rising and falling, he repeated, "On your belly. Right now."
Slowly she did as he had commanded.
Spengler looked down at her, enjoying the moments of anticipation, and then he knelt beside her legs. He placed his hands on her bare bottom, manipulating and squeezing it and finding it as lush and springy as he knew it would be. He traced the cleft between her cheeks and their undercurves After he finished playing with her buttocks, he turned her over.
Looking up at him, Gloria cursed. Spengler laughed at her and bent to nuzzle and kiss her breasts. He took his time with them, his hands straying all over her body as he did so. His lips surrounded and suctioned each crisp pink nipple, his fingers moving around her hips and then down her thighs and in between. He raised his mouth slightly above her breasts and shook his head from side to side, brushing his lips back and forth across the stiff nipples. Gloria moaned in spite of herself, his fingers now doing as much as his mouth to bring about her rise in passion.
Quickly the man scooted down until his face was pressed against the softness of her lower belly. He kissed her there thoroughly and, beneath him, Gloria began to squirm and move up and down.
In time he brought himself fully over her and used his hands to further excite her breasts, bunching them in his fingers, squeezing roughly, pulling at her nipples. He pressed both lush breasts together until the nipples were very close to one another and he brought his face down against the single satiny pillow thus created, turning slightly from side to side, teasing each nipple in turn.
Suddenly he reared back on his haunches and ran both hands beneath her lower body, grabbing a lush cheek in each of them. He brought himself to contact and then raised Gloria's body until it enclosed him.
She released an anguished cry. But she began to move, animal desire now overriding everything. As much as she hated this man, she had to have him then. They each moved, crashing together.
Spengler continued to hold and roll her buttocks in his hands as he. stabbed her brutally.
Gloria began saying, "Oh ... oh ... oh...." in rhythmic time with their thrusting.
The tempo increased and increased and suddenly Spengler felt Gloria's body tighten and contract violently as they began to reach a frenzied climax together. She moaned, whimpered, and wriggled as the man went at her with ever increasing fervor until finally he released a tagged cry and fell forward upon her.
After he stood up, Gloria remained on the floor and cried softly. Spengler began to get dressed. By the time he was ready to leave, she had sat up, wiped her eyes, and covered herself with her lacy slip. She did not look at him.
"Now, before I tell you where your husband is," Spengler said, "you can write me that check for three thousand bucks."
Gloria stood up slowly, stepped into her half-slip and snapped the elastic at her belly.
"Here," Spengler said, tossing her the purse which had been lying in a chair.
She opened it, removed her checkbook and pen, and began writing. When she had the check prepared, Gloria threw it at the man. Spengler bent to pick it off the floor.
He read it, then jammed it into his pocket and turned to walk to the door. "Thanks a lot, Gloria," he said. "It was a pleasure doing business with you."
She cursed him softly but in the strongest terms.
He laughed, his hand on the doorknob.
"Where is he?" Gloria demanded. "Tell me!"
Spengler said, "Perkins, Colorado. Mrs. Scofield's rooming house. Ask for Al Bailey." He grinned, opened the door and added, "I wish you both the greatest of happiness." With that, he left her.
TWELVE
Adam spent most of the day at work thinking about the offer Perry Dalton had made him, and also about Tina Dalton. Most of all, however, he thought of Gloria. He hadn't wanted to. He had told himself that Gloria and their life together was a closed issue. But that resolution had not affected his yearning for her.
The more he tried to force himself to think of Tina and the closer he came to a decision to tell her all about himself and, if she were still interested in him, to accept her father's offer of a position, the more he seemed to see Gloria's image projected on the screen of his mind. He could not escape it.
The opportunity Perry Dalton had offered seemed like a good one-one that Adam would like and one in which he could prove himself. And the prize of Tina, which obviously went with the offer, was one that most men would have leaped at. She was an excitingly beautiful young woman.
But she wasn't Gloria.
There was only one Gloria.
Adam was forced at last to face up to the fact that she was still in his blood and that, as long as she remained a part of him, he couldn't give a serious thought to anyone else.
But life with Gloria was hopeless. There was simply no way for them!
Immediately after four o'clock, Adam went to Mike Sandor's place and asked for a bottle of whiskey. He belted a number of straight shots in rapid succession and only when he felt the familiar warm tightness envelop his brain did he leave and find his way back to Mrs. Scofield's house. He stretched out on the bed and tried to blot everything from his consciousness, but Gloria's image remained before him-smiling, taunting.
He cursed it and then went for the bottle that was tucked away in a dresser drawer. He had brought it with him from California but hadn't touched it since arriving in Perkins. Adam had never been a solitary drinker. At that moment, however, he had to find escape from the torture that gripped him.
He found it gradually.
Some time later he was dimly aware of a rapping at the door ... of a woman's voice saying something about a telephone call. He did not answer and, in a few moments, the woman went away.
Adam knew nothing more until morning.
Work, the next day, was torture. Adam's head was splitting and he was in a mood of deep depression such as usually came over him in the wake of a hefty drinking bout. When four o'clock arrived, he had never been so glad to see quitting time.
As he walked to his car, he was not glad to see the person who was seated there, waiting for him. Rarely in his life had Adam Bales been reluctant to see a woman as beautiful as Tina Dalton. This, however, was one of the times.
"Hi, Al," she said to him brightly. "I should be angry with you."
Adam forced a grin as he looked at her. "Now, what's that about?"
"I tried to call you last night," she explained, looking at him petulantly. "Mrs. Scofield said you were in your room, but you wouldn't answer when she knocked."
He shrugged. "Sorry, but I felt a little tired. I turned in early."
"Al...." Tina reached to take his hand, drawing him close to the side of the car. She looked up at him seriously. "You've seemed different ever since you talked with my father the other night-different, I mean, than you were with me the night before. What is it? Are you angry because I bragged you up to Daddy and got him to offer you a job? I guess it was impertinent, since we'd known one another for only a day. If that's it ... well, I'm sorry. Don't hold it against me. All you have to say is no. I'll understand."
"It isn't the job, Tina," Adam said softly. He gave her a long look, reading the concern and desire for him that were evident in her gaze, and then he added, "Look-let's go for a little drive, shall we? I think you and I ought to have a talk."
"Sure," she said, and followed him with her eyes as he walked around the car's hood and climbed in on the driver's side.
Adam drove for a short distance toward town, then turned off into the woods and brought the Healy to a stop.
Tina's eyes twinkled as she asked, "Now what is this earth-shaking matter that we have to consider, hm?" In spite of her effort to place the conversation in a light vein, it was clear that Tina was anxious.
Adam turned to her. "You don't know me, Tina."
"You sound like a song title."
"I mean it," he said. "You don't even know my right name."
The smile left her face at that and her green eyes regarded him soberly.
"My name's Adam Bales," he said. "Not Al Baily. Does that mean anything to you?"
Her brow furrowed slightly. "I think it does. The name rings a bell. You know, I told you the other day that I thought we'd met somewhere before. Why in the world would you change your name, Al ... I mean, Adam?"
"If you'd remembered where you'd heard the name-I mean, in what connection-you wouldn't have had to ask me that one. I'm married, Tina. My wife is Gloria Trent."
His words exploded in the car with something like the force of a bomb. Tina stared at him, apparently not knowing what to say.
"I'm sorry," Adam continued. "I had no business lying to you. But when we first met, I was just out looking for kicks. Later, when I realized how much I liked you, and then when your father offered me a job ... well, I realized that I would have to tell you the truth. I should have done it night before last, when we went out to the movie together, but I couldn't get up the nerve, I guess."
Tina said, "Well, at least that explains why I thought I had seen you somewhere and why your real name was familiar. It was from the newspaper stories and pictures at the time you and Gloria Trent got married." Tina had spoken sadly. Now she paused, then added in a sharper tone, "What are you doing in a godforsaken place like this, and working on a road-building crew? Have you left your wife?"
Adam said, "That's about it."
"But there's been nothing in the papers...."
"I know. Gloria didn't want any publicity. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't tell anyone, either."
"You two are getting a divorce?" Tina asked him.
"Frankly, I don't know. We haven't talked about it."
"I see." Tina looked down at her hands. "Well, thanks for telling me, Adam."
"I like you very much," he said. "And I'm sorry if I hurt you. Right now, things are so mixed up that.. :'n
"Sure," Tina said. "I understand."
It was silent in the car for a couple of minutes.
"Maybe you'd better take me back to where your car was parked," Tina said softly. "My Chevvy's back there."
"All right," Adam agreed.
As the Healy hummed along the road, Tina kept her head turned the other way and nothing was said. Adam felt about as bad as she did, but he wasn't sure whether his sadness was due only to his realization that he had hurt her or to the loss of her from his life. Maybe it was due to things in general, he decided. The whole damned world seemed dark right then.
Tina and Adam said goodbye and she forced a smile as he held her hand in his. "It's all right if you want to call me," she added. "Of course, I'll be in town for only a couple more days."
"I'm sorry about that," Adam told her.
Still smiling, she chirped, "One of those things." But Adam could see the glint of tears in her eyes as she turned away from him.
He was feeling lower than ever as he walked up the front steps of Mrs. Scofield's rooming house. All he needed right then, he told himself, was for Kathy to appear in the hall-way. For a guy who used to be pretty good at juggling women, Adam decided that he had really slipped. Yeah, it had happened when he married Gloria, he told himself. That had changed him and he knew he would never be the same again.
He didn't see Kathy. In fact, there seemed to be no one around, a fact for which he was thankful. As he mounted the steps to his second-floor room, he caught himself thinking of Gloria again. He cursed half-aloud.
Why couldn't he get rid of her?
It was over and done with. Why wouldn't the memory leave him alone?
He opened the door of his room and stared. Was he going mad? Now, instead of just having her on his mind, he was actually seeing her! At least, he seemed to be. Was it a hallucination or....
"Hello, darling." Gloria stood up from the chair in which she had been sitting and walked towards him. Her voice had been tremulous and there were tears shining in her blue eyes.
Adam gaped at her. Her beauty was as wonderfully exciting as ever ... and she was real. She was the realest thing in the whole mixed-up, crazy world!
"Gloria...." he murmured, not knowing what else to say.
He had a tremendous urge to rush to her and enfold her in his arms. Caution arose to tell him, No ... she's no good for you ... don't do it.
But, he felt, caution be damned!
He did go to her, and he did embrace her, and the feel of her lovely body against him was like the sight of an oasis to a man suffering from thirst in the desert.
Adam held her head tenderly between his hands and positioned her for a kiss. Their mouths met hungrily, Gloria's tongue rising to meet his, and they drank deeply of the passion each of them had for the other-the passion that no one else could replace.
Finally, when Adam had released her, Gloria began to cry and he brought her to him again and let her head nestle against his shoulder.
"Oh, darling ... darling...." she murmured through her tears. "Why did you leave me? Why? Don't you know that you and I being together is more important than anything else in the world?"
"I know it now," Adam admitted.
Then Gloria pushed away, dabbed at her eyes, and gave her husband a bright smile. "I've got lots to tell you, darling. Come on ... sit down and listen. You'll never guess."
Moving almost like an automaton, Adam sat next to her on the edge of the bed. He realized that he had said practically nothing. But what could he say? Emotion had engulfed his reason and left him stranded like a wayward ship in a storm.
"First of all," Gloria told him, clasping his hand in hers, "I'm quitting Hollywood."
"What?" Adam could utter only the single word.
"After you left, I took a lot of time to think. I went back over my career and finally realized that it wasn't what I wanted out of life ... it never had been, and I saw at last that it never could be. Something that happened yesterday really capped the climax. I don't want Hollywood any more; I don't want any part of it. You're what I want, darling. Our marriage is the only thing that ever gave life any meaning for me, but it was hopeless as long as I tried to hold onto my career. So I'm through with Hollywood-for good and all, as of right now."
"Gloria...." Adam murmured. He put her hands up to his lips and kissed them. "I love you, angel. I've been trying to convince myself that I could live without you, but I discovered it was hopeless. If you hadn't come to me today, I'd probably have gone running back to California with my tail between my legs."
"Then I'm glad I came to you," she said. "I'm the one who should ask forgiveness."
"We've both hurt one another," Adam said, "and I think we're both sorry. As for your career, nothing could make me feel better than to hear that you're quitting. But, damn it, you've got to be practical. You're not going to be happy living on what I can make."
"Oh, yes, I am," she told him. "As a construction contractor, you ought to do pretty well."
"Now, Gloria...." He began in a warning voice.
"Before you get all wound up, listen," she said urgently. She stood and faced him. "Things are different now. What would be the most sensible thing for a woman in my position to do-after she's made up her mind that she isn't happy with her career and decides to quit, but doesn't have any other way of making money? The answer's obvious-go into business."
Adam sat quietly and listened to her. She began to pace back and forth in front of him. "But what business, that's the question. If she invests in one that she doesn't know anything about, and with nobody to protect her, she'd be apt to lose her pants. But if she's married to a smart guy, with a business education behind him and several years of good practical experience, the smartest thing in the world would be for her to rely on him, wouldn't you say?"
Gloria stopped pacing and faced Adam again. "Well, I'm relying on you, darling. I'm proposing a partnership. I'll put up the money and you can supply the know-how, and whatever we make will belong to both of us-fifty-fifty. What do you say, hm?"
Adam had been dead-set against taking money from his wife. But the way she was now presenting it did seem a little different. Anyway, he realized that he had been pretty hard-nosed before. The fact that Gloria was quitting Hollywood would make all the difference in the world to their marriage, he knew. And it was true that she needed an investment opportunity. He convinced himself that the proposition was all right.
"Lady," he said to her, reaching to grasp her hand, "you've just made yourself a deal."
Gloria dropped to his lap eagerly, without thought for the fact that his clothes were dirty and that she was wearing a white summer dress. As he held her, it seemed very much like the day they first met.
Adam looked at her closely. "You're sure, now, that this is what you want to do? I mean, giving up your career. You're not going to regret it later?"
"I'll never regret it, Adam," she said with certainty. "The only thing in the world that I could really regret would be losing you. That's the thing that just can't happen."
"Don't worry, darling, it won't," he assured her, and added, "ever."
They kissed and the old excitement began to build in Adam as he felt her slim arms clinging to his neck and the turgid press of her bosom against him. Her tongue was a darting lance of slithering fire and her mouth tasted sweeter than all the sugar in the world.
With his left arm holding her firmly at the back, Adam brought his other hand to her breasts and closed it around the left one. He squeezed gently and thrilled to the discovery that Gloria was wearing no brassiere. Her yielding loveliness was just beneath the dress, ready and waiting for him.
He ended their kiss and immediately attacked the buttons at the top of her dress. He opened them quickly and pushed the dress down her arms, which left her bust standing bare-full, erect, pink-nippled. He lowered his mouth to them, holding first one and then the other in his hands and guiding its fresh nipple to his lips.
After he had kissed her flesh he could restrain no longer the urge to ease his wife over onto the bed. He did so and she sighed.
"Come to me, Adam," she said. "We have an awful lot of making up to do."
Adam knew it and he was anxious to begin.
He grasped her white dress at the hem and lifted it up her thighs and past her hips, which she raised from the bed to help him. Her half-slip went with it so that all she then wore below her waist were shoes, stockings, and very pale pink pants. Since the stockings had their own elastic tops, she wore no garter belt.
Adam reached for her pants, grasped them firmly at the top, and drew them down from her hips which were wriggling excitedly, over her lush thighs, past her knees, and away. Then he yanked his belt and pushed his own clothes down.
He got onto the bed between her upraised knees and moved forward urgently. She was ready for him.
They touched ... then joined ... and the floodtide of passion which had accumulated within each of them burst forth in a torrent of wild, uninhibited motion. Never had Adam's hips pistoned in such complete abandon and never had he felt a woman so completely match his every thrust and undulation with her own.
They struggled desperately up the slope of passion, the prize at the top looming nearer and nearer to them. For minutes after it had seemed to be within reach, it yet eluded them until the struggle became one of almost unbearable urgency.
Gloria cried out as she made a lunge that brought her to within touching distance of the prize, then gasped and threw herself forward once more to grasp it, her lithe body tightening about Adam's and seeming to draw him into the very depths of its warmth and wonder.
And then Adam was touching the prize as well. He groped and struggled the last few moments ... had it ... and he and his wife came to rest, more at peace and like one with each other than they had ever been before.
"I love you, angel," Adam murmured, his lips moving against Gloria's lush, sweet bosom.
"And I love you," she said fervently. "How I love you!
