"You sit down, Daddy, and I'll kneel in front of you and pretend to be your slave girl. And you're the wicked king who'll have my head chopped off if I don't give you the best blowjob you ever had in your life,"
He chuckled uncertainly. She had a knack, sometimes an unsettling one, for enfolding ordinary things in weird ideas.
Melody lowered her pretty face to his cock, slipping the moist red ring of her lips over the swollen head. He gasped as he felt her quick little tongue flickering around inside the tight suck.
Suddenly, his balls felt as if they would burst and flood her mouth, but she made him gasp again by pulling her lips away.
"No-please-suck it some more-I-"
"A blowjob that lasts one minute can't be the best one you ever had in your life," she murmured, "O Great King."
Chapter One
John Creighton sipped his drink and stared at the bright blue waters of the Gulf. He was pleased with himself. He had filled his glass with lemonade instead of his usual midmorning gin and tonic. Today might be one of those days, all too rare lately s when he might get some work done.
He didn't blame his drinking for his lack of progress, not entirely. It was partly due to his utter boredom with his work. Besides, successfully courting a rich and beautiful young widow took time, energy, and careful planning. All things considered, it was understandable that his latest novel was now nearly six weeks overdue.
Unfortunately, his editor didn't find it understandable. She had taken to calling him up every day for the past week. He winced as he realized that the daily phone call hadn't arrived yet. He had a neurotic fear of telephones-no, he corrected himself, not neurotic, because it was well-founded: a telephone invariably rang because someone wanted something from him, a bill collector, an agent, an editor. These unpleasant thoughts made him consider the idea of spiking his lemonade, but he decided against it. He thought of unplugging the telephone, but he rejected that idea, too. Carol might call. Unhappily, she didn't share his distaste for telephones, and he didn't want to seem like an inattentive lover at this stage in the game.
Her love of the telephone, he reflected, was her only really annoying trait; and, once they were married, she would no longer have to call him up four or five times a day to tell him what she was thinking or what she was reading or what she'd recently heard or seen or bought. He supposed that he ought to find that trait endearing, or at least encouraging. It showed her eagerness to share every little facet of her life with him. He hoped she would be equally eager to share her money.
He sighed with something like contentment. He was certain that she would. He had convinced Carol, by putting on an almost paranoid act about paying for everything out of his own pocket, that he wasn't interested in her for her money. She believed that her wealth actually constituted a liability in his eyes. She often said that she had no head for business, and she had recently asked for his advice in a couple of real estate transactions. He should have no trouble gaining complete control of the purse strings.
After that, he could get those annoying bill-collectors off his back. And he could either rescue this beach house from foreclosure or sell it and move to the Riviera. Nor would he be forced to grind out cheap paperback thrillers anymore. He could devote all his energy to the more serious work he'd been thinking about doing for the past fifteen years.
While he'd been thinking, John had been abstractedly watching Melody swim. Now she came out of the water, fifty feet from the screened porch of the beach house. He felt a twinge of annoyance to see that she was wearing her virtually non-existent black bikini. It was little more than a thong, fully exposing both cheeks of her buttocks; in front, it revealed everything but the central cleft of her shaven pubic area. He wondered why she bothered to wear it at all, because she wasn't wearing the top.
"Jesus! Are you trying to get arrested?" he called.
She pouted, saying nothing, while she peeled off her white bathing cap and went through the motions of dislodging water from her ears. His annoyance was swept away by a sudden, almost surprisingly violent, upsurge of lust. His prick pushed hard against his bathing trunks. He reflected a little sadly that Carol, for all her beauty and her other good points, couldn't trigger such spontaneous eruptions of desire in him.
He scolded her some more, but his tone was lighter: "You're the one who's always telling me what they're like around here-swamp crackers and rednecks. That kind of outfit could get you sent up for juvenile delinquency."
"Nobody around, this time of year," she said, walking toward the house with the slow, deliberate, slightly rolling gait that reminded him of the padding of a big cat. "People don't come out to these crummy dumps till school is out, usually."
"Which brings up another point: why aren't you in school?"
"School sucks," she explained. "Is my towel up there?"
"Yeah."
She came onto the porch and let the door slam behind her, took one of his cigarettes without asking, and stared at his drink while she lit it. "Drunk again," she observed.
"It's lemonade, baby."
She snorted with contemptuous disbelief. "Go swimming," she said. "You're getting fat as a pig."
That was a lie, but he refused to rise to any bait. He knew why she was angry. Melody was the only hitch, and a very big hitch indeed, in his plans for the future. He would have to try harder to make her see reason.
With no pretense of modesty, she slipped out of her nominal bikini and began toweling herself in front of him, her cigarette dangling from her lip. It was the pose of a movie whore, given an almost startling impact of obscenity by the fact that she was only fifteen.
Analyze Melody feature by feature, and you would have said she was a weird-looking girl; but the totality of her face transcended the sum of its parts to produce something that was striking and original and almost alarmingly attractive. Her blue eyes were narrow and slanted over very high and prominent cheekbones. Her nose was short and tilted up at an angle that might have made it seem ugly on another face. Her mouth was wide, her lips firm and full above a squarish chin that was cleft in the middle. She wore her hair in two blonde braids encircling her small, regal head. Her expression was habitually one of total impassivity, but it nevertheless gave an impression of contemptuous arrogance, even cruelty: with her slanted eyes and lithe, compact body, she might have been a princess of the Huns.
John studied her face, unwilling to let his eyes travel down her nude body, knowing that she was deliberately posing and trying to provoke him. He sometimes entertained the fancy that her skin had been put on too tightly, making it impossible for her to change expression. Her skin was rosy-white, almost translucent, an oddity in Florida, but she never deliberately sunbathed, and she avoided the hours of strongest sunlight. He knew, though, that she could change expression, that the impassive cat-mask could change into a smile like sunlight. She wasn't smiling now, though.
Against his will, his eyes dropped. She was small, no more than an inch over five feet, but her body was that of a fully developed woman. He sometimes wondered if the early blooming of her body was responsible for her sexual precocity, or if the reverse was true: he'd started fucking Melody three years ago, when she was twelve. He hadn't seduced her, he was sure of that. It had been the other way around. She'd demanded it, she'd caught him in a weak moment, she ... he didn't want to go through all that again. What was done was done.
Her breasts contributed to the theory that her skin was on too tight. They had no sag whatsoever. On the contrary, the nipples tipped slightly upward, at a curiously provocative, perky angle. They were normally big and plump and pink, but now they were darker and smaller and harder from her immersion in the water. They quivered as she toweled herself.
His eyes slid down the concavity of her lithe belly to her pink, hairless pussy. That was one of his pleasant little chores: shaving it for her. She asked him to do it, complaining that she was too hairy to wear a bikini. That was certainly true of the thong she'd been wearing this morning. He sighed, realizing how foolish he'd been to complain about her wearing it, when he'd bought the Rudi Gernreich creation for her himself on his last trip to New York.
"I guess I'm just jealous," he said, trying to apologize. "That busybody next door-"
"Bullshit, jealous! You're the one who wants to get married. Why don't we get married? We could go somewhere, get new ID's-"
"Oh, cut it out, you're too young, obviously, no matter what kind of ID you get. And," he added, trying to make it sound like a joke, "you don't have any money. When I marry Carol, I can get you anything you want. That's one of the reasons I want to have money."
"How noble. You're willing to grit your teeth and fuck that old big-assed redhead all for my sake, huh? You could try working for a change, if you're all that desperate for money."
She was maddening. She was flaying him with her words, but at the same time her body was shouting an entirely different message. She'd been gradually inching forward on her tiny bare feet until she stood over him. The drying motions of her towel had become merely an excuse to roll her hips slowly and lewdly in front of his face, thrusting her pelvis toward him on each grinding gyration.
He could no longer resist the temptation. He gripped the taut young cheeks of her ass in both hands and thrust his face forward, burying his mouth in her crotch. She laughed, the wicked little tinkle of bells in some oriental torture chamber. He thrust his tongue deep into the warm, pink slit, surprised to find that it was already wet with her sticky syrup.
"Now who's not worried about the rednecks and crackers and the busybody next door?" she mocked. "Right out on the front porch!"
John winced. He supposed the man next door-Ken Burke, he said his name was-had designs on Melody, not understanding the situation. He was always turning up, uninvited and unwelcome, trying to make friends. His was the only other occupied house on this stretch of beach, and he seemed to have no regular job to go to. He might pick this moment to turn up at the screen door. Reluctantly, John pulled his face away from Melody's juicy cunt.
"You're right," he said hoarsely, wiping his lips as he stood up. "Let's go inside."
He half expected Melody to do or say something bitchy to break off the moment and leave him in an agony of frustration-she often did lately, trying to get even with him for Carol- but she surprised him by padding demurely into the house before him. He paused to make a survey of the bright white beach, saw that it was empty, and followed her in. She was waiting for him just inside the door, where she began tugging eagerly and inexpertly at his bathing trunks.
"Can Carol blow you as good as I do?"
"Christ, baby," he said, pushing his trunks down. "I told you. I've never even laid her. Honestly."
"That's dumb," Melody said, leading him toward the rattan couch by tickling his bare prick with her fingertips.
"She's an old-fashioned girl."
"Frigid, you mean."
"She's sort of traumatized by the death of her husband."
"That sounds like a crock. How do you know you'll even be able to get it up for her? I bet you won't. I bet it's just me you can do it with."
John was startled by her insight, almost frightened by it, because she'd just voiced one of the innermost doubts that plagued him. His passion for Melody was a constant, all-consuming thing that never changed except to grow. He never saw her without wanting her. She could never touch him without arousing him. He dreamed about her, and woke up reaching for her. He began missing her when she was away from him for more than an hour or so. His own intensity of lust would have scared him if she didn't share it and return it herself. They were like two fires that fed on each other to create a firestorm.
It was nothing like that with Carol. He could tell himself that she was beautiful, witty, intelligent; he could think of all her good features, her lush figure, her flame-red hair, her intense green eyes; he could think of how warmly and passionately she kissed-but it was all intellectualized, it wasn't a twisting in the guts, an emptiness in the loins, a spontaneous swelling of his cock at the mention of her name. Suppose he couldn't get it up for her? Suppose he was damned-or blessed?-to have no woman but Melody in his life?
"What-the bed-" he mumbled, trying to guide her toward the bedroom, but she was intent on pushing him down on the couch.
"No," she said firmly. "You sit down and I'll kneel in front of you and pretend to be your slave girl. And you're the wicked king who'll have my head chopped off if I don't give you the best blowjob you ever had in your life."
He chuckled uncertainly. She had a knack, sometimes an unsettling one, for enfolding ordinary things in weird ideas. Sometimes her playacting seemed to take control of her.
He sat on the couch and she wiggled up between his knees, all her attention fixed on the hard, upthrust rod before her. She stroked it lightly with the fingertips of both hands, a feathery touch that tickled upward from his balls to the tip of his prick.
"And if the queen doesn't do as well as your slave girl," she said, "you have to chop her head off and put me in her place."
John might have had some comment on that, but Melody abruptly blew all thought out of his mind by lowering her pretty face quickly to his cock and slipping the moist red ring of her lips over the swollen head. He gasped with pleasure as he felt her quick little tongue flickering around inside the tight suck. She slipped downward, taking more and more inside her mouth, her wet tongue in constant motion.
He stroked the corona of her golden braids, wishing vaguely that her hair were unbound and hanging down on his bare thighs. But worn this way, it seemed to emphasize the strikingly unusual beauty of her bone-structure; and it revealed her oddly pointed ears. He sometimes wondered if she were a throwback to some primal set of genes that, given another line of evolution, would have resulted in a creature more feline than human. Sometimes he had disturbing sexual dreams in which Melody was metamorphosized into a cat.
He realized that he was letting his mind drift away, that he was all but hallucinating on the sensuous drug of her sucking mouth. She sucked his prick steadily deeper, until her pert little nose was rubbing in the black curls of his pubic hair. Her little fingertips jerked steadily at that part of the root she couldn't fit inside her mouth, setting up a syncopated rhythm with the pumping of her lips and the steady washing of her rolling tongue.
Just when it seemed that the simmering load of juice that was boiling up in his balls was about to burst free and flood her mouth, she made him gasp again by pulling her lips away. It was as if some sixth sense told her just how far she could go without making him come.
"No-please-suck it some more-I-"
"A blowjob that lasts one minute can't be the best one you ever had in your life," she murmured, her lips moving against the superheated skin of his engorged cock as she spoke, "O Great King."
Before he could protest, she was working on him with her tongue again. She licked her way all around the bulging knob at the end, lapping off the sticky ooze that was already seeping out in eager anticipation. He was just barely able to stand this teasing, as he wouldn't have been able to stand another moment of her sucking. She moved downward, her moist, warm breath moving around his prick as she traced every vein in the hard, white shaft with the tip of her tongue. He nudged his cock against the smoothness of her pretty face, trying to force her to take it back within the compression of her sweet lips, but she evaded his efforts, intent on teasing him to the absolute limits of his endurance.
She moved ever lower, pushing his thighs apart now as her tongue probed through his hair to lick his balls. The skin contracted under her touch while she seemed determined to cover every inch of them with her tongue. He stroked her shoulders and leaned forward to cup the firm, silky weight of her tits, trying to pull her back upward, trying to urge her to suck him off at last.
Giggling at the torture she knew she was inflicting on him, she relented at last. She slipped her lips once more over the head of his throbbing cock and sucked it deep into her mouth. She was a wet vortex of sexual delight. She sucked hard, hollowing her cheeks and completely immersing his prick with the feel of her soft flesh. Her lips, pouted out to enclose as much of his tingling meat as she could, kept up a steady, pumping suction. Her tongue slipped and slid around the head in a slow swirl.
He wished he could summon the self-control needed to hold still and relish this dazzling display of her precocious talent, but it was impossible to hold still. The urge to shove his cock deeper into her lips and fuck her in the mouth was overpowering. He did it slowly, though, as slowly as he could possibly bear it, and he restrained himself from thrusting it deeper than she wanted to take it. He slid his hands again to the rosy-smooth tautness of her shoulders and rose from the couch in a half-crouch, rocking his hips to slide his prick in and out.
She sucked harder, knowing he was about to come. She slid her hands behind him and dug her clawed fingers into his ass, bracing him in his strained position so he could move his hips more firmly and shove his prick faster.
He wanted it to go on forever, but the hot surges cresting upward from his balls could no longer be contained. He gasped, shuddering, as his cock gave a hard, hammering pulse, and then another, shooting jets of come into her delicious mouth. The sinuous muscles of her throat moved as she swallowed it, gobbling the hot load down and sucking for more.
He sank back on the couch, breathing hard, while Melody continued to suck until the hot spurts had faded to tiny driblets. She pulled at his softening prick until she was thoroughly satisfied that she had sucked out every last drop. Then she sat back on her heels, licking a trickle of excess semen from her lower lip before she smiled up at him.
"Was it?" she asked.
"The best ever? It always seems that way."
She got up and slipped into his lap, draping her arms around his neck. "You have to promise to tell me, though," she said, interrupting to kiss him, "when Carol does it,, whether she's as good."
"All right," he sighed. "But she couldn't be."
"Off with her head, then," Melody said sternly; but then she giggled. "I was just thinking. You have to write a note telling why I stayed home from school. Are you?"
"Sure," John said, sliding his hand up her thigh as he felt the sluggish stirrings of reawakening lust, "but let's make it a real good one."
"We won't get much opportunity when you marry Carol."
"Sure, we will," John said, although he feared she was right.
"Maybe we ought to tell her."
"Tell her what?" he said, deliberately not comprehending.
"About us."
"Are you crazy? Do you suppose she'd marry me-or stay married to me-if she knew I was fucking my own daughter?"
Melody thought for a moment. "Maybe I'll ten her."
"That would be nice. I'd go to jail, and you'd go to reform school."
"It's something for you to think about, though. In case you let her come between us too much."
John felt a slight chill as he studied her. Her face was once more an impassive, catlike mask, in which he could read nothing.
Chapter Two
Carol Owen emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, toweling herself briskly. As always, her long and leisurely shower had turned the bathroom into an atmospheric model of a tropical swamp. As often happened, she'd forgotten to switch off the air conditioning in the bedroom. The contrast was bracing. She thought about retreating into the steam to acclimatize herself, but she decided to plunge into the cold room and put up with a few minutes' discomfort. It served her right, and she believed in taking the consequences of her actions. She wrapped the towel tightly around her body and switched off the window unit.
"Next time, dope, turn it off first" she muttered.
She sat on the edge of the double bed and dislodged a cigarette from a box of Marlboros. She noticed that her hand shook. She knew it wasn't shaking from the cold. The long shower, intended to calm her nerves after this morning's unpleasant encounter, hadn't accomplished its purpose.
Fumbling with the matches, she got them wet. They wouldn't strike.
"Fuck this climate!" she cried.
She knew it was illogical to blame the climate of Lunalia, Florida, for getting her matches wet this time; but the climate had done enough to warrant even unjustified criticism. Matches wouldn't strike. Cigarettes got soggy. Ice cubes melted too fast, disrupting the tempo of her drinking. Books fell apart. Clothing and furniture sprouted fungus growths.
She pulled a fresh towel from the bureau and continued to dry herself as she prowled the hotel bedroom in search of a match. Starting with the climate, her litany of dissatisfaction continued. Unless you told them specifically not to do it, you got grits with your breakfast bacon and eggs. Grits, for chrissakes! And the water. It wasn't the cool, strong surge of the Atlantic she'd come to love from childhood summers at the Jersey shore. Most of the time the Gulf just lay there, waveless; green and beautiful, yes, but it felt like a tepid bathtub.
Then there were the natives. She sensed that their friendliness and charm was a carefully polished act, a strategy that let them indulge their insatiable curiosity about her personal life. She sensed an underlying hostility, as if they blamed her personally for the Civil War. All this tropical paradise needed to make it completely was a noisy army of Hawaiian-shifted tourists, but fortunately it was the off season.
The temperature in the room had risen perceptibly by the time she found a light. She returned to the window and put the air conditioner on its lowest setting.
She didn't know why people came here to retire, but they did, in droves. South of town, the mangrove swamps had been blitzed and bulldozed into lagoon developments, most of them little more than glorified trailer parks. The retirees who filled them had their choice of staying home and providing a blood-bank for the mosquito's, or else they could go out in the Gulf and sport with the sea urchins and jellyfish and stingrays and sharks. She'd even heard an alligator booming one night in the swamps. One of Florida's best-kept secrets, John said, was that those things really did eat people.
If she hadn't met John, she would have turned right around and gone home after taking One look at the real estate Charlie had left her. It consisted of six cottages across the causeway on Lunalia Beach, a couple of business properties in the town of Lunalia, and two hundred acres of swampland to the north and east of town. On paper, it was a small fortune. In fact, the rents barely met the costs of taxes and maintenance. The economic prospect of developing the swampland looked bleak at the moment; nor could she unload it for anything near its presumed value. John had advised her to hold on to it and wait for better days, and that had seemed like sound advice.
She had to smile, remembering how she'd met John Creighton. It had been one of those embarrassing moments. She'd gotten her directions confused, and she'd been giving his house the once-over on the assumption that it belonged to her. He'd invited her in to look around, and she'd done so. It was only after she'd been given a guided tour of the place that both of them realized the nature of the misunderstanding. By showing her around, he was just being polite-or humoring her, perhaps, thinking she was some kind of nut. She'd retreated in confusion, as hastily as possible.
The next day he'd shown up at her hotel, volunteering his services as an obviously much-needed guide. A local lawyer was supposed to be filling that function. He was a Sidney Green-street look-alive who'd offered her a paper cup full of Southern Comfort at their first meeting, and prying him loose from his office had proven an impossible task. So, after only a brief hesitation, she accepted John's offer.
He wasn't a native-thank God-but he knew the area well. He could reel off amusing anecdotes about the pirates and conquistadores, the Seminoles and swamp-crackers who had called this part of the world home at one time or another. More to the point, he could read the tax maps in the County Clerk's office and talk knowledgeably about drainage and sewage and zoning laws and the latest environmental legislation covering developments. A stint on a newspaper had given him a working knowledge of local government, and he was always collecting odd bits of information, never knowing when he might be able to use it in a novel. He was no expert, certainly, but he always seemed to know who to ask and what to ask them when an expert was needed. She found herself depending on him.
More than that-she found herself opening up, cracking through the shell that had calcified around her since Charlie's death. She tried to tell herself that it wasn't a sexual thing, just a platonic friendship with an older man. But John was thirty-nine, and if Charlie hadn't been shot down in Vietnam he'd be only a year younger than that now.
But he didn't apply the pressure that younger men did. With him, dinner and a show seemed to be an end in itself, rather than an unpleasant but necessary preliminary to a roll in the hay. He, sent her flowers. He sent her letters-and that was odd, getting letters from someone who lived less than three miles from her hotel, but John had a thing about telephones and he had also had a passion for writing letters. It struck her as a novel and charming means of communication.
Men who tried to rush her into bed-and most men seemed like that nowadays-had chilled her. She'd begun to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with her, that Charlie's death had traumatized her far more than she was willing to admit. She'd always been shy and awkward with men. Charlie had been the first and only man to arouse her-until she'd met John.
She found herself making advances to him. It was she who initiated contact, the touching of hands, the meaningful meeting of eyes. The first time they'd kissed-well, she'd had to just about entice him into it.
The first explanation that came readily to mind, one that she tried hard to reject, was that John was queer. He had a daughter, of course, but that proved nothing. She just couldn't believe that he was a homosexual, however. She got nothing but thoroughly masculine vibrations from him. She usually sensed a lack of interest, sometimes even a contempt, in homosexuals, but John just didn't project that.
Then he, in turn, opened up. He'd told her about his two marriages-about how they'd ended so suddenly and disastrously. His first wife had died six years ago in Yucatan, miles from any doctor, apparently the victim of some swift and deadly tropical disease. Two years ago, his second wife had died just as abruptly and unexpectedly as the first. Her fatal illness had been diagnosed as encephalitis.
Both women had been young, beautiful, radiantly healthy. John had loved each of them, and both of them had been snatched away from him without warning. He didn't articulate it in such terms, but at least on a subconscious level he believed that he was cursed; that anyone he dared to love would be taken away from him. That was what was holding him back from her.
Carol took this as a challenge. She set out to make him love her. She had to admit to herself that she already loved him. It wasn't easy. John had other hangups-her money, for instance. He'd been shocked to learn that her assets totaled more than two million dollars. He had a horror of becoming-as he'd once described it in a bitter moment-"a rich woman's lapdog" before he'd made his own fortune through literature. He refused to let her pay for anything. He sulked when she sent him gifts he considered expensive.
It was sometimes a source of irritation to her, but more often she found his attitude charming-and refreshing, too, in contrast with the assorted fortune-hunters she'd been fending off during most of her adult life. Even the fat lawyer, Alvin Montgomery, had chuckled his way through a lot of coy remarks about lovely young widows in need of advice and protection, remarks that fell just short of a proposal of marriage, during their very first meeting.
Dry now, she hung her towels in the bathroom and caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror that lined the inside of the door. Sudden glimpses of herself in mirrors never failed to startle her. She'd grown so accustomed to being a skinny, gawky beanpole that she'd never quite assimilated in her mind the change that had come over her at the age of eighteen. In her mind's eye she was still lank and awkward, and the reality sometimes caught her by surprise.
Now, at twenty-four, the only reminder of her teenage rawboned-look was her face. She thought it looked haggard, with the eyes set a little too deeply, the cheeks hollowed. Men said it was beautiful. One, a literary type, had once told her that it looked as if she'd been feeding on her own beauty, but she suspected he'd cribbed that from some book. He'd been the sort who would have. Her nose was straight and classical, but she thought it was a shade too long; she thought her lips were a little too full. Men disagreed on both counts.
Her examination wasn't entirely critical. There were things about her looks that she liked. Her eyes, for instance, were an unusual shade of light green that she was quite pleased with. In sunlight, they seemed translucent. Her hair, too, was a natural shade of fiery red that she wouldn't have traded for any other.
Fortunately, she hadn't been cursed with the kind of skin that usually went with such hair. She tanned easily and evenly, and during the two months of her stay in Florida, her skin had assumed a deep shade of gold that made the contrast of her hair and eyes even more arresting than usual. The outlines of a skimpy bikini showed a pale cream across her breasts and loins.
She wished she had the guts to get rid of those white stripes before her honeymoon. Big stretches of Lunalia Beach were virtually deserted at this time of year. If she wanted total and unquestionable privacy, she could rent an outboard runabout and find some little island in the bay that nobody would stumble across in a million years. Still she was reluctant. She'd never managed to overcome the modesty that had been drilled into her by a strict Catholic upbringing, even though she'd consciously rejected most of those teachings.
It would have been easier to get in some nude sunbathing sessions if she had a girlfriend, but she just didn't know any women in Lunalia Beach. Even if she did know them, she couldn't imagine any of the natives or retirees joining in such sessions.
She made a mental correction: she knew one girl, Melody Creighton. Melody would be the ideal companion for such a junket, too, because-to put it as charitably as possible-Melody's attitude toward modesty was casual. She thought nothing of going around the house half-naked, apparently unconscious of the fact that she had become, physically, a fully developed woman. Her father, so like the caricature of the absent-minded genius in many ways, didn't even seem to notice. The girl needed a mother badly.
Carol didn't know if she was really prepared to fill that role. Despite the difference in their ages, she felt that Melody was almost a contemporary. That was understandable. John and his daughter had moved around a lot during her formative years. She'd never settled long enough in one place to make friends her own age. Her principal companion was her father. She was a precocious girl, mentally and physically mature beyond her years; and when she compared her intelligent, urbane, witty, talented, charming father with the kids her own age-well, they were bound to suffer in comparison, and so she made no effort to make friends with them. Carol had more than once observed her freezing out a boy on the telephone.
Melody's sophisticated outlook and her dependence on her father were understandable, but that didn't dissuade Carol from regarding the relationship as-to put it more bluntly than she really wanted to-unhealthy. All girls had sexual urges, however deviously repressed, for their fathers. With Melody, the urge would naturally be stronger, the repression more devious, the potential psychological problems more shattering.
Considering all these things, it would be impossible-certainly beyond her capability-to come on with Melody like a full-fledged stepmother. She would have to accept the girl's status as a quasi-contemporary in the family and try to win her confidence as a friend. On that basis, maybe the sunbathing idea wasn't a bad one.
Somehow, she'd already gotten off on the wrong foot with John's daughter. Most of it was due to jealousy, of course; subconsciously or not, Melody didn't want some woman barging in to disrupt the status quo and share her beloved daddy with her. Only she didn't call him Daddy, she called him John, which served to underline her curious situation, to Carol's way of thinking.
Someone less willing than Carol was to meet Melody half-way would have said that the kid was spoiled rotten. Carol rejected such simplistic terminology. There was a problem there, definitely, but it had to be unraveled carefully. Maybe she could do it. Maybe, if they had a long talk about it, she could bring John around to seeing that a problem existed and enlist his help. But whatever she did, she had to gain Melody's confidence, if not her friendship or respect. An actively hostile Melody could turn her marriage into a nightmare.
She looked again at those white strips in the mirror. They were ugly. She would have to get rid of them before-the honeymoon. She used that word, but the image that came unbidden to her mind was something far more graphic than the word. For a moment she could feel his naked body pressing against her, feel his arms around her, feel his cock sliding inward ... She gasped. She felt a spasm almost like a pain in her loins. She'd never before felt so actively, aggressively, hungrily sexual, and the feeling had swept over her like a sudden and unexpected wave.
"I want to fuck you, John," she whispered aloud. "I want to fuck you like I've never wanted it before."
She succeeded in shocking herself. She felt ineffably wicked, like a naughty little schoolgirl experimenting with a newly acquired word.
"Fuck," she whispered again. "I want you to slip your cock into me and fuck me."
She stared at herself. Her eyelids were lowered, her lips were slightly parted, she looked like a caricature of a woman in heat. She giggled at her mirrored image, but even that did nothing to ease the reality of the tingling sensations in her body. Her nipples had become hard and erect. She slid her hands up her body to fondle them, making them even harder. They looked wizened and brown against the smooth cream of her untanned breasts.
Why the hell didn't she tell him? Why didn't she call him up right this minute and repeat those words-well, maybe not those words exactly, but repeat the gist of them into his ear. She giggled again at the thought of making an obscene telephone call to her fianc�.
She had no real moral qualms about making love to him before they were married. It was just that waiting had seemed the proper thing to do. And there had been no overwhelming physical compulsion. John had tried to get her into bed, but he hadn't seemed noticeably upset when she'd declined. She'd been nervous and tense, and she'd had a nebulous, not very closely examined notion that she didn't want to spoil things, that she didn't want to be unfaithful to Charlie's memory by going to bed with a man she wasn't married to.
Now, suddenly, alone in her hotel room, she felt just such an overwhelming, physical compulsion. She wanted John. She wanted him now. Melody would be in school at this hour. She could throw something on and be there in ten minutes to surprise him-really surprise him,, she reflected.
That would be fun, but he might not be there, and she'd feel like an utter fool if she drove out there, impelled by passion, and found an empty house. Maybe he was working. Sometimes, pulled out of his study with his work still on his mind, he hardly seemed to recognize her. She couldn't, of course, suggest that he come here. Despite its incredible name-the Hotel Hooker-Lunalia's only formal hotel wasn't the sort of place for an afternoon assignation.
Again she felt deliciously wicked as she lay on the bed and reached for the telephone. Whenever the phone caught her in the shower, some irrational habit of modesty made her grab a towel or a robe to cover herself before answering it. Now she was flouting that ingrained quirk. She was going to lie here naked and talk to a man. Not just any man, either, but the one who was going to be fucking her within an hour from now.
She reached for the phone and propped herself on her elbow to dial. The phone rang five times. Six. Seven. God damn it! Maybe he thought it was his editor. But if he thought that she was going to bother him, he would have taken the phone off the hook. Or a bill collector. No. He must be out, swimming perhaps. She would give it ten rings. Nine.
"Hello?" said a voice already weary with boredom before the conversation had begun: Melody's.
"What are you doing home from school?" Carol blurted.
She could have kicked herself. It was a rude thing to say; more than that, she hadn't been able to keep a tone of disappointment and vexation from her voice. Lamely, Carol added: " ... I mean, I didn't expect to hear your voice."
"I'm sick. I think it's something I ate," Melody said. "I'm in bed now, as a matter of fact."
She didn't sound sick. She sounded now as if she were in on some huge joke. But at least she was in a good mood, and it was seldom that Carol found her in one.
"I suppose you want to speak to John," Melody continued. "He just got in."
Carol toyed with the notion that John was tickling her while she tried to talk on the telephone: that's what it sounded like. But that would have been out of character. She'd never seen them engage in any such horseplay. Their physical contact was limited to an occasional chaste kiss, both father and daughter leaning forward from the waist as if afraid of bringing their bodies in contact. They did hold hands a lot, though, and Carol had always found that charming and a little quaint.
"Wait," Carol said. "I wanted to talk to you, too."
"Oh?" Her tone became guarded.
"Yes. I wondered if we could go swimming together. Sort of a picnic, you know. Just you and me. We ought to start to get to know each other a little better, don't you think?"
More giggles. Damn it, he must be tickling her! Or maybe she was teasing him, trying to keep the phone away from him. Carol had the unpleasant feeling that she was intruding, that secrets were being kept from her, that she was the odd one out.
When Melody didn't answer, Carol continued: "Sounds like you're having one hell of a time out there."
Melody whooped with laughter. Carol had never heard her make such an exuberant, unrestrained sound-for the first time, she sounded like the fifteen-year-old that she was.
"You really ought to be here, Carol," Melody said.
Yes, I really ought to-but not with you around, kiddo, she thought. Her plans for the afternoon, if she could call them plans, had been blown out the window by Melody's unexpected presence. The only possible alternative was going with John to one of the motels out on the highway, and that prospect seemed dreary and sordid. She didn't want to do it like that, her first time with John, not at some shack up motel.
"You don't sound sick at all," Carol observed. She wanted to bring an end to this stupid conversation, but at the same time she didn't want to break off the only prolonged contact she'd ever achieved with the elusive and aloof Melody. It was an exasperating situation, and she tried hard not to let her exasperation show.
Another private joke; this time she thought she heard John's laughter in the background. She fought down her rising annoyance. Of course they had private jokes. They always would. She couldn't allow herself to be jealous.
"Listen, Melody, I'm sorry if I interrupted something-"
"No, you didn't, Carol, honestly, you didn't interrupt anything."
"-but how about that picnic I mentioned?"
"Just the two of us, huh, getting acquainted?" Melody said, and Carol was alert for any hint of mockery in her tone; but her fear was dispelled when Melody went on, "That sounds great. Can we do it tomorrow?"
"Why-sure. Of course. But if you aren't feeling well-"
"I feel terrific, Carol. You have no idea."
Carol could only absorb that without comment. It occurred to her that tomorrow was a school day, too, but she decided not to mention it. Now that she'd at last begun to establish some kind of rapport with the girl, it was no time to revert to adult stuffiness.
"I bet you want to talk to John, now. He's right here."
"Yes, I-"
"Hi, baby," John interrupted.
"What's going on there, John? It sounds like you're having a pillow fight or something."
"Something."
He seldom held up his end of a telephone conversation. Carol heard background noises that she couldn't identify, but she guessed that Melody was still in the room with him. That inhibited her from speaking about what was really on her mind-what had been on her mind. She'd cooled off considerably since her conversation with Melody had begun. Abstractedly, she started to reach for a robe to cover her nakedness. Then she remembered her little game. Cooled off or not, she would talk to him like this, nude.
"What's on your mind?" he asked. "I was lonely."
"Well Come on over," he said, but she didn't detect any real enthusiasm in his voice.
"What I wanted ... "
"What is it, Carol?"
"Oh ... nothing. I guess I'm just upset today, John," she said. She remembered the incident that had upset her this morning. It no longer bothered her nearly as much as it had, but it gave her the chance to take her mind off her more immediate problem. "This crazy little cop stopped me this morning, while I was driving-"
"Yeah, Beau Boulton. Short for Beaufort. Sheriff's deputy."
"What are you, psychic?"
"Your description was perfect: a crazy little cop. He's upset a lot of people in the county."
"He was so ... creepy. I mean, it was all 'Yes, Ma'am' and 'No, Ma'am,' and. 'If'n you'd be so kind, Ma'am'-and all the time he was undressing me with his eyes. He made me feel-cheap, and unclean, just with his insinuating voice. I was shaking when I got back to the hotel."
"Don't let Beau get on your nerves. He won't really bother you unless you're black or poor, preferably both."
"This whole place is getting on my nerves, John. This afternoon, I ... " Her voice trailed off. That would have been just dandy: telling him about her sudden onset of desire for him as a symptom of her general nervousness.
He didn't seem to notice her dangling sentence. He went on: "Beau stands about five-six and weighs one-forty, but there's not a bigger man in the county when he puts on that gun and badge. At least, that's how Beau feels about it. He gave me the treatment once, too. I gathered that he doesn't like people who even read books, let alone those who write them."
Carol smiled. The horrible little man in the opaque sunglasses no longer seemed like something that had strutted out of a nightmare, but just another local character. There were plenty of those, God knew.
"I'm sorry I bothered you, John. I've probably taken you away from your work."
"Hardly. Why don't you come over?"
"I-no, I think I'll rest this afternoon. Take a nap. Maybe later, this evening."
"Fine. Just come out."
She began to drowse. Halfway between awake and asleep it occurred to her that the telephone was in John's bedroom, not Melody's, but the significance of that fact, if any, eluded her.
Chapter Three
John Creighton lay in bed, the telephone propped between his ear and his shoulder. A cigarette dangled from his lip. His daughter knelt over him, her knees straddling his hips. Her palms rested lightly against the hair on his chest. His hard prick was buried in her cunt.
He hung up the telephone. "That joke was what killed burlesque," he told Melody. "'He just got in.'"
"I thought I just made it up."
"They had this routine where someone would keep calling a doctor's office and ask, 'Is the doctor in yet?' And his nurse would say, 'No, he's not in yet and the gag would be that the doctor was trying to screw her, only each time he got to the point of doing it, the telephone would ring."
"You shouldn't have answered it."
"I figured it was her. She's been known to ring the phone thirty times if nobody answers."
"You didn't have to lie there all day jabbering about Beau Boulton. And smoking a cigarette, like you were having your shoes shined in a railroad station, for Christ's sake."
She took the cigarette away from him and took a deep drag. She shifted her position slightly, impaling herself more firmly on his stiff cock. He could barely see the root of it protruding from the distended lips of her pussy.
"How do you suppose that makes me feel?" she continued.
"Conspiratorial?" he suggested.
She frowned at him. He knew she wasn't really angry with him. She'd enjoyed mocking Carol over the telephone. But the interruption reminding her of Carol's existence, had put her in a bitchy mood. He twisted his hips, stirring his prick around in the tight clasp of her quim.
"That's better," she murmured. "I was afraid you were going to make me do all the work."
That was a laugh. He felt as if he'd been put through a meat grinder today. Melody had been insatiable. He supposed that his impending marriage had something to do with her redoubled hunger for sex. She was trying to prove to him that he didn't need anybody else, perhaps that he couldn't even handle anybody else if he hoped to keep her satisfied.
She allowed him to retrieve his cigarette, but there was only enough left for a single puff before he ground it out in the bedside ashtray. His hands free, he slipped them under the firm cheeks of her ass and raised her slightly, revealing the thick red stem of his cock, glistening with her juice. He'd already fucked her four times today. In addition, she'd started the day off by blowing him. He wondered how long he could fuck her without coming. They'd already been joined in this position for nearly half an hour. If he was trying to set a record, this was certainly the time to do it. He felt as if she'd milked every last drop of come from his balls. His cock, though swollen and hard as a club, felt anesthetized from the treatment she'd already given it.
Melody sank forward on her braced palms like a lioness drinking. Her coronet of braids was unbound now, and the perfumed weight of her golden hair fell around him as her mouth sought his. Her soft tongue slipped inward, tangled momentarily with his, then slid out again, duplicating the rhythm she began to establish as she raised and lowered her cunt on his prick. The hard nubs of her breasts grazed his chest as she writhed in constant, sinuous motion.
John slid his hands upward to hold her closer against him as he pushed his hips up from the bed to spear her on his quivering prick. She squeezed him with her cunt so tightly that it was almost painful, then eased her grip and slithered the wet flesh around his cock like jelly. She had amazing control over the muscles of her cunt, little tricks and wiggles and slippery surges made it ripple in a constant syncopation to the movements of her hips. No grown woman he'd ever fucked could fuck like Melody could, and it seemed that she'd known how to do it almost from the start. But she'd been right, in that double entendre she'd delivered to poor Carol. She was getting steadily better.
He winced at his own choice of words: poor Carol. He tried to convince himself that it was the wrong epithet to use. Lucky Carol, that was more to the point. She was getting an understanding man who had succeeded in making her shed all the self-crippling defenses she'd erected around herself. She was getting a husband who would be tender and devoted and considerate and who ... who was in love with his own daughter. Poor Carol.
Nebulously, without ever spelling out the details to himself, he'd been trying to evolve some scheme for weaning Melody away from him. The affair would have to end sometime. Melody herself had brought that truth painfully home to him this morning when she'd seriously suggested that they avail themselves of phony identification papers and get married. It was the next logical step; and because it was logical, it showed how crazy was the premise on which it was based. He couldn't hold on to her forever.
But beyond that point, the scheme simply failed to evolve. Boarding school? He could just see himself trying to talk her into that! And even if, by some miracle, he did manage to talk her into it or force her into it, she'd promptly find a way of getting herself kicked out and shipped back home.
The only other alternative would be to try to get her interested in boys her own age. Even if she would buy that-and he didn't think she would-his own emotions wouldn't let him do it. Encouraging her to accept dates would make him feel like a cross between a pimp and a cuckold.
There were other possible solutions, of course, but they were too drastic to consider: he could turn himself in to the police, or lay the problem before a psychiatrist, or enter into a suicide pact with Melody. The last solution, the most drastic of all, was one that often crept unbidden into his midnight thoughts.
All right, then: poor Carol. She didn't know what she was getting into, and there was no way he could change it. The only decent thing to do would be to break the engagement-but that was impossible: he needed the money. If he could create something eternal, if he could only write the work of genius that he knew he was capable of writing, then his wasted life would be justified and its sins rendered meaningless. He could do that only if he had time; and he could buy time with Carol's money.
"I'm not boring you, am I?"
That was Melody, snapping him back abruptly from another trip through the dull gray rut he'd worn in his mind. He'd been lying immobile for a few minutes, just letting her work on him with the steady pumping of her cunt.
"Jesus, baby, no, of course not. I was just-just working on my self-control, that's all."
"Don't worry about that," she purred. "Just let it happen."
That, he thought, might be the motto of his life, or its epitaph: he just let it happen. That was the reason for Jean's death and probably for Leila's, too; that was the reason for his impending marriage to Carol, and that was the reason for what he was doing now-he just let it happen.
Melody snatched his attention away from his bitter thoughts. She pulled back from his embrace to kneel upright above his loins, still firmly skewered on his upthrust cock. Her face was expressionless, but her cat-eyes smoldered with lust as she tossed her tawny mane back from her white shoulders.
He saw her everyday. He'd seen her everyday of her life. But each time he saw her she seemed more beautiful, more desirable than the last, and now her beauty wrenched his heart. She crouched over him, her back slightly arched to thrust her tits out to the best advantage. Her cheeks were flushed, and fine beads of sweat glittered in the central groove of her triangular upper lip. Her nipples quivered as she pumped with alternate thighs, pushing herself up and down on his cock, slapping her buttocks against his legs.
He pushed up as far as he could, burying every last inch of his prick in the depths of her shaven cunt. He felt her hot juice trickle down around his balls as it seeped and spattered from her churning pussy. He realized that he wasn't going to set any marathon fucking records with her, not this time, because already a tingling glow was building up in this prick, slowly but surely building up to explosive force.
She was slowing down, though. Her bouncing rhythm grew erratic as her thigh muscles began to tire from her long exertions.
"Ow," she muttered, pouting. "Fucking legs."
John couldn't bear the thought of stopping or even slowing down at this point. He rolled over, taking her willingly with him, not breaking for an instant the tight union of their bodies. Now she lay on her back and encircled him with her lithe legs while he stroked his prick into her deep and hard. Her cunt was like a jar of hot honey, oozing and sliding around his hammering cock while her hips bucked and wriggled against his thrusts.
She moaned and grunted in time to his rhythmic humping. Sometimes she would fling all inhibitions aside and shriek with ecstasy when she came. She had been holding herself back with some difficulty during the past two weeks, uncomfortably aware of the proximity of their neighbor's house. Sometimes she would slip, though, and give vent to screams that sounded like the death agonies of a wildcat. For all Ken Burke's efforts to get acquainted with them, John thought he detected an undercurrent of coldness, even hostility, in the man's manner toward him; and he wondered if Burke believed that he was in the habit of thrashing his daughter.
She didn't scream, not this time, but she did one thing that she often did in the grip of an orgasm. She whispered first, then groaned: "Daddy ... Daddy!" It was the only time she ever called him that anymore.
She writhed and twisted beneath him. He felt her nails digging into his shoulders, but the pain seemed remote and unimportant compared to the overwhelming sensations that were surging out from the pillar of flesh embedded firmly in her clinging cunt. He thrust harder and deeper and faster than before, trying to drive her over the edge again before the spindling strand of his self-control snapped. He clawed at her buttocks, dragging her closer and tighter against him while her moans became loud whimpers and she finally unleashed the sort of scream she'd been trying to suppress, a long, quavering howl that would have drawn pity from a damned soul burning in hell.
Their neighbor was now the last thing on his mind. He exulted in his power to take her to such heights of ecstasy. The bedsprings clanked and jingled as the tempo of his fucking escalated to jackhammer vibrations. He thought that he couldn't possibly have a drop of gism left in his balls after all the fucking they'd done today, but her incredible cunt was able to draw on still untapped reserves. He groaned, clutching her hard against him as his balls boiled over and sent gout after gout of simmering come down the electrified path of his prick to spatter deep inside her sucking quim.
They lay in a lazy tangle, sharing a cigarette while a warm breeze from the bedroom window dried the slime on their loins.
"You ought to make a point, one of these days, of telling what's-his-name that I don't beat you," John murmured.
"So what'll I tell him instead? The truth?" Melody giggled.
He hadn't thought of that. He frowned. Then he had an inspiration. "Tell him you throw fits. Maybe that will keep him from sucking around you."
She favored him with an inscrutable mask. He suspected that she was again going to attack the inconsistency of his jealousy, but she said: "He's always got his air conditioner going. He probably doesn't hear me."
John snorted with mild contempt. His dislike of air conditioning almost equaled his hatred of telephones. He found even the summer heat of the Gulf Coast preferable to the steady drone of machinery. Melody agreed with him, and even took his eccentricity a step further: closed doors and windows gave her claustrophobia. He was pleased with this reminder of their concurrent tastes; tastes that Ken Burke didn't share.
But she couldn't resist digging him a little where it hurt: "Will we tell Carol that I throw fits, too, in case she happens to overhear me?"
He tried to sound calm and reasonable. "We'll just have to be careful, that's all. I'll get an office away from home. Tell her I have to be absolutely undisturbed there. Then-"
"Oh, great. It'll be just like fucking your secretary. A little love nest over a Chinese restaurant. Will you fuck me on the desk, or will you pick up a second-hand couch for that?"
"It'll work out. Something will work out."
He supposed she was angry now, but he couldn't really tell. Her blue, slant-eyed gaze made him uncomfortable, and he studied his cigarette as if it might tell him something.
He found himself thinking about the novel he ought to be writing, tentatively titled The Last Man Left Alive. It was about a mild-mannered businessman whose wife suddenly and unexpectedly deserts him for an itinerant rodeo cowboy who happens to pick her up in a bar. At first her choice seems so ludicrously inappropriate to the hero that he wonders if she hasn't lost her mind. But then, thinking over her lover's qualities-his youth, his fitness, his dashing lack of responsibility-he comes face to face with his own, dullness and flabbiness and drudging respectability. In order to prove to himself that he is as tough and intrepid in reality as he is in his daydreams, he sets out with some friends to scale a difficult peak in the Rockies. Getting to the top becomes an overwhelming obsession, even after the ascent begins to turn into a disaster. He succeeds, but only at the expense of his companions' lives.
It should have been easy. He had a clear idea of where the story was going and he knew the characters inside out. He'd written a dozen such thrillers before without great difficulty. The emphasis in his work was on fast pacing, violent action, and moderately explicit sex, all of it done in a brisk and spare style that owed a deep and unacknowledged debut to Ernest Hemingway.
This one wasn't easy, and he thought he knew why. In a moment of nostalgia, or playfulness-or maybe it was just laziness-he'd patterned the character of the absconding wife on Leila, his second wife. Leila, of course, had never done anything to him like the wife in the book. On the contrary, she never would have looked at another man. She not only put up with his quirks and his moods and his sometimes downright churlish behavior, she loved him for them. She was convinced that he was a genius. She was the closest thing he'd ever met to a saint. Having Leila around was like having his own resident cheerleader, always willing to tell him how great he was before he even hinted that she ought to.
But in most things-appearance, speech patterns, habits, tastes-he'd modeled the fictional Linda McLean on the late Leila Creighton. He'd never before tried to pattern an imaginary character directly on a real person, and he knew now that doing so had been a ghastly mistake. Whenever he tried to write about Linda, he found himself thinking about Leila. Instead of pounding the typewriter, he sat in front of it and reminisced.
The characters were interdependent, all parts of the same fabric. Taking Linda out and replacing her with an entirely different character would have been as easy as chopping a man's arm off and sewing on someone else's. Even if he had commanded such surgical wizardry, he didn't have the time to do it. He was writing the final copy as he went along, on white bond paper with carbon, knowing that he didn't even have the time to retype it.
Leila. She'd been blonde and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and a squarish chin. She'd looked a little like Jean. She'd looked a little like the woman Melody might grow up to become. He'd loved her. He'd wanted her. And then Melody had started to grow up.
He'd always liked living near an ocean, any ocean. Then they'd lived in a ramshackle summer home in a northern state, a big barn of a place that had been haphazardly winterized for year-round living. It groaned and sighed when the wind blew through its sprung seams from the North Atlantic combers. He used to take long walks on the winter beach, ostensibly thrashing out problems in his work; actually, trying to face up to his incestuous desire for his daughter, trying to understand it and fight it down.
Leila tried hard to gain Melody's affection. She was a sort of cheerleader for her, too, praising her, flattering her, but subtly trying to nudge her where she wanted her to go. But she thought the child was hostile to her. John scoffed at this, pointing out that Melody seldom let her emotions show. What Leila took for hostility was the cool, composed facade she'd possessed even then. But the girl made Leila uneasy.
Then came the winter when Melody was twelve. Leila received word that her mother was dying in Kansas. It was near Christmas. Leila made much of holidays, perhaps trying to recapture her own happy childhood by turning them into mammoth productions for Melody. During the four years that Leila had been her stepmother, Melody always had a fancier Halloween costume, a bigger spread of Christmas gifts, a fuller Easter basket, than any of her contemporaries.
Leila had to go to her mother's bedside, but she hated the idea of a family separation at Christmas. Kansas was the last place John ever wanted to go. He promised Leila he would defer the celebration of Christmas until her return, and she reluctantly went by herself.
The holiday season usually plunged John into a black depression. He hated it. He usually observed it by starting to drink on Christmas Eve and continuing to do so through New Year's Day. This year, even without the formal observance-although he did fudge a bit on his promise by setting up a tree and getting Melody a few preliminary gifts-was no exception.
Maybe the drinking explained it. It was- Christmas night? He couldn't remember, not precisely. Something disturbed his sound sleep. He coughed, and he felt someone stroking his back. A naked body lay in the bed beside him, close to him. Leila, of course. He snuggled against her. She drew closer.
Maybe he dozed. Maybe he dreamed. He didn't remember the onset of his erection, nor did he recall when the hand had first touched it and encircled it. He grumbled. His mouth was full of fur, his brain full of fog, his stomach sour and restless. Despite his erection, the prospect of sex wasn't very alluring. He grumbled something, pretending to be less awake than he was, and tried to shift his position. The hand stayed on his prick. The hand squeezed it.
He turned back toward her. He rested a hand on her hip. It was cool and smooth, but somehow it didn't feel right. Her fingers pulled and peeled his cock, masturbating him slowly, lifting his erection to full engorgement.
A whisper so soft it might have originated inside his own skull: "Do it. Please."
Almost without conscious effort, his hands began to recreate a familiar structure of caresses. It didn't take him long at all to realize that he wasn't in bed with a grown woman. Nor did it take him long after that to realize who it was. He froze, fully awake and fully sober.
"Baby. No." It was a plea.
"Yes." It was a command.
He held her wrist to make her stop pumping him. His strength or his will didn't extend far enough to draw her hand entirely away. She tickled it with her fingertips. He told himself that the shock of recognition should have withered his prick. It didn't. His prick got harder and stiffer. It began to seep fluid against her wrist.
He buried his face in the pillow so hard that red blotches swam before his eyes. She coiled around him, insinuating, touching, kissing, guiding. He tried to pretend he wasn't there, but it didn't work.
His hand was on her cunt. Maybe she had placed it there, but he didn't think so. She spread her legs wide and arched her pelvis up against his touch. Only the finest peach-fuzz covered the soft flesh, the protuberant little bone of her pubic mound.
"Lower," she said.
His fingers, obedient to her will and not his, touched even softer flesh, warm and moist.
He lifted his face from the pillow. Snow had frozen on the windows. Light from a streetlamp filtered through, not strong enough to let him see her except as a shadow in his bed. Her white teeth gleamed. She kissed him on the lips. She didn't know how to do it. It was a chaste pucker. It enflamed him. He bore her head down on her pillow, his mouth clamped to hers, worrying her lips as a dog worries a bone.
He didn't remember rolling over, but now be was propped above her, his weight supported on his elbows. She was breathing hard.
"Put it in me."
"It'll hurt."
"No, it won't. I stretched it with my fingers."
The calmness of that remark, the calculation it revealed, numbed him. The dreams that had been plaguing bun, the dreams in which Melody submitted willingly, joyfully-had they been spontaneously generated by some sickness in his soul, as he'd thought, or had they been triggered by the subconscious recognition of her desires? Or had he unknowingly revealed his lust, igniting hers?
Analyzing those questions now would have been like studying nuclear physics in the midst of an atomic attack. The questions bubbled in his mind, but they had no meaning or importance. The only thing that mattered now was that the tip of his cock was pressing at the threshold of his daughter's virginal cunt.
"I didn't know it was so big," she said.
"I-"
"Don't stop."
He shifted his position, easing inward. Her body was obscenely slim, her breasts criminally undeveloped. Her cunt seemed tight as a loop of wire.
"Don't stop," she repeated, but her voice threatened at any minute to break into a yelp of pain.
He paused, breathing deeply, resting when the head of his cock was inside the tight wet furnace. Before this, he would have found it hard to imagine a man experiencing ecstasy and shame at the same time. Now he didn't have to imagine it. Guilt and shame gripped him like a physical sickness, but it coexisted with a wave of pleasure and desire.
He could salvage something if he stopped now. He could tell her that he'd been half asleep, that he hadn't known what he was doing. He could still explain to her that it was wrong. But even while he was entertaining these thoughts, he was beginning to push his prick inward again.
Melody tensed, shivering, then relaxed. She tensed again, but this time she went looser and softer and more yielding than before when she relaxed. Her slim, small body seemed to have become strangely larger in the darkness, no longer awkward and bony but sure and womanly and all-engulfing. Her kisses had become as hungry as his, open-mouthed, tongue-tangling sucks.
His cock slid into her more easily than before, but hers was still the tightest hole he'd ever penetrated. Even if she'd been playing with herself with her fingers, she was still technically a virgin, the only one he'd ever had. He sometimes regretted that neither Jean nor Leila had been virgins when he'd married them, although he told himself that what they'd done before meeting him was none of his business. Nevertheless, he regretted it. An odd world, where a man could fuck a virgin only by fucking his preteen daughter-and he felt a sudden chill when he put the proposition in such blunt words.
"Don't stop," Melody whispered, sensing his sudden tension.
"It's ... "
"It's all right," Melody supplied when words failed him. "It's wonderful."
He felt her little fingers tapping lightly around his crotch, caressing his hairy balls. It was only then that he realized he'd given his little daughter every last inch of his big, adult cock. She couldn't find any of it to touch beyond the stretched confines of her pussy.
"You did it," she murmured approvingly. "We did it."
"Oh, sweetie," he groaned, and he kissed her, and his groan was an outlet for violent emotions that he couldn't begin to understand or sort apart.
One emotion, however, was so direct and blunt and overwhelming that it swiftly blotted out the others: the simple desire to fuck her. She sighed and murmured in time to his strokes as he pushed his swollen prong in and out of her. She clutched him tighter and wiggled against him, encouraging him, reassuring him that she wanted it as badly as he did.
"God ... damn!" fee snarled, unable to hold back the sudden splurge of his ejaculation in the tight confines of her pussy. He fucked her faster while his prick pumped hot jets of come into her cunt, slowing only when he knew that his climax was ended.
He lay still for a long time, and so did she. Finally Melody said, "We can do it again. Can't we?"
Chapter Four
They did it again. And again. And again. Leila's absence became the occasion for a nonstop orgy of incestuous sex in the somewhat gloomy bedroom of the Victorian summer mansion. They got out of bed only to go to the bathroom or to make a fast and unbalanced meal from canned foods. He began to worry about what Leila would say when she saw the mess they were creating in the kitchen. Examining this, it amused him that he could worry about such superficial things in the midst of his life's utter dislocation.
Melody remained the instigator, the leader, the consciously tempting temptation. She woke him many times in the night, snuggling, cuddling, arousing. Fucking her was the last thing-he did before dropping off for the night, the first thing on waking up in the morning. Night and morning became a blur. Time became meaningless. The only reality was the timeless reality of the bed, the increasingly eager and educated response of her slim young body.
He was amazed, even shocked, by her innovative ability. The first time she blew him was an example of that. From the way she did it, he was certain that it wasn't something she'd heard about from some well-informed schoolmate. She did it out of experimental curiosity, and she was delighted to discover that it pleased him. With no instruction or advice from her father, she developed an ever-expanding repertoire of little tricks and tickles and wiggles with her talented tongue.
The only sour note was her distaste and impatience with contraceptives, and his insistence, after that first night, that he wear them whenever he fucked her. Another of his minor worries was the necessity of replenishing the supply before Leila came home and wondered what happened to all of them.
Now, three years later, in Florida, she'd been on the pill for a year, thanks to a reasonable doctor.
John got up and walked to the window. The Gulf was an intense blue-green, the sand a blazing white. He was pleased with himself that his imagination could have recreated so clearly the cold and gloomy north, when the temperature here hovered just below ninety. I ought to be a writer, he thought sardonically.
"What's eating you?" she mumbled, not taking her mouth fully away from the pillow.
"Nothing. Today reminded me. Of that Christmas vacation."
She laughed, not needing to be told which one.
"I wouldn't have let you get this far away from the bed, that time," she said.
Down the beach he saw the lean, muscular figure of Ken Burke, blond and tanned. He was surf-casting, but he didn't seem entirely absorbed in the sport. He kept casting glances over his shoulder at their house. He felt again a surge of irritation that a man of thirty should take such an interest in his fifteen-year-old daughter. Examining the feeling, he laughed at himself with a trace of bitterness.
She murmured interrogatively.
"Your boyfriend again," he explained, "He's pretending to be fishing."
"If you keep calling him that, maybe you'll give me ideas."
Her words went through his heart like an iron spike. "Sorry," he said.
"Come back and show me how sorry you are."
He waited the moment it took to draw a deep breath and compose his face. He saw that Burke was still casually working his way toward their beach. But he wouldn't be able to see through the bedroom window, no matter how close he came; it was too high.
He turned to see that Melody lay face-down on the bed, not watching him. Her back glowed with a fine sheen of sweat. Her legs were parted. Her feet were hidden under the rumpled sheet they had kicked down to the bottom of the bed.
He pulled the sheet away, revealing the wrinkled pink soles, the toes like little pearls. Her feet were tiny, even for a small girl, feet made for an elf. The plump swell of her calf seemed large by comparison, more voluptuous and enticing. He bent over and kissed the sole of her left foot.
She flexed her knee, lazily raising the foot he had kissed. Her knelt on the bed behind her and kissed it again. He then slid his tongue into each of the interstices between her pretty toes, licking with the tip. He held her ankle lightly, massaging her calf with the other hand. His cock began to rise. She arched her foot daintily to let him kiss the instep, still not looking back at him. She made an unintelligible murmur of sensuous laziness. He kissed her ankle, planning to kiss his way to her cunt.
"The other one," she said.
He didn't know immediately what she meant, but she showed him by pulling her left foot out of his light grasp and raising the right one. He repeated the procedure but expanded on it, kissing all the way around the perimeter of her sole, savoring the salt of her sweat on his tongue.
"Now, kiss my ass," she ordered.
He leaned forward, resting his weight on his palms as he kissed each of the plump and perfect hemispheres in turn. She wiggled, spreading her legs wider apart. She slid the pillow under her belly, raising her buttocks.
"I meant my asshole," she said. "Kiss that."
"This time I'm the slave and you're the tyrannical queen, huh?"
"That's right. Do me with your tongue."
He didn't know which of the roles that she cast him in, king or slave, that he preferred, although this one was probably closer to the reality of the situation. He flickered his tongue down the deep cleft between her cheeks until it came in contact with even softer flesh, the pretty pink bud of her asshole. He stiffened his tongue and slipped it inside, vibrating it rapidly. She squirmed, sighing. He slid his hands beneath her body to cup the taut firmness of her breasts while he licked her asshole.
It was odd that their relationship should be like this, that even as a child of twelve she should have had the dominant role. Both Jean and Leila had been passive, malleable. He had interpreted these qualities not as traits of their characters but as reflections of his own, testimonials to his own forcefulness or leadership. Melody had shown him how foolish that notion was, He couldn't say no to her.
After the insane excess of that Christmas week, he had tried to wrench the situation back to normal. It had seemed possible then. Melody had returned to school after the holidays. He returned to the work he'd been neglecting. She still shared his bed at night, but he tried to condition her to the idea that things had to return to normal when Leila came home. She listened, saying little.
Leila had known that her mother was dying. The advance knowledge didn't seem to soften the blow. When she returned during the second week in January, she had lost weight. She was pale. She seldom smiled, and she sometimes cried at night. She was in her mid-twenties, but John thought that she looked strangely old.
Their lovemaking after her return was infrequent, desultory, uninspired. She often complained that she had a headache, or that she was too tired. John didn't insist. He would lie awake beside her body, a body that had once seemed exciting but now seemed pulpy and pallid and flabby. He would lie awake and think of Melody.
Melody watched them, cat-eyed, inscrutable. Leila would snap at her for no reason, sometimes scream at her over trifles. John uneasily remembered Jean, his first wife, and her battles with mental illness. He tried to be a calming influence, but he often found himself defending Melody with unreasonable vehemence.
Perhaps a month passed. Leila professed to be reading a new depth of contempt and mockery in Melody's impassive face. Toward John, Melody acted as if the Christmas week orgy had never happened. Then one night when Leila was asleep, Melody came silently into their bedroom. It was as if she knew he would be awake. She touched him and beckoned. He followed.
John had not yet achieved his limited success as a writer of thrillers in those days. His principal income came from the writing of pornographic novels-and the irony of that was not lost on him. Jean had left him with some stocks and bonds, but they hadn't lasted as long as he'd thought they would. He supplemented his income by rewriting articles for a sensational weekly tabloid. Leila worked as a receptionist in a dentist's office, and her paycheck was the only regular income they could count on with any certainty.
After the first time, when John begged her not to come to him again at night, they resumed their affair-between three in the afternoon, when Melody returned from school, and five, when Leila was due home. They also had Saturday mornings together. John found it a tormenting arrangement. His whole day was structured around those two short hours. They seemed more like two minutes, while the rest of each day dragged on forever.
The winter passed. They had to vacate the summer mansion by the first of June, when the rent rose from a hundred and fifty a month to fifteen hundred a month for the summer season, They found a reasonably priced bungalow inland, amid scrub pines and cranberry bogs.
To John's great relief, Leila emerged from the depression that had followed her mother's death. She began to regain some weight. She stopped crying at night and she took a renewed interest in sex, an interest that John was hard put to match.
It couldn't have happened long after they moved to the bungalow, because Melody was still in school. Even though he couldn't remember the date, he was amazed at how clearly etched were the images of that afternoon in his mind. Melody was wearing a red plaid miniskirt, pleated like a kilt, and a frilly white blouse. Her braids were wrapped in the coronet she'd decided was her favorite hair style, even though it made her look incongruously mature and sophisticated-Leila's opinion, really-at thirteen. She had a fine mustache of milk on her upper lip, and her breath smelled of peanut butter when he kissed her as she turned from the door of the refrigerator.
"Daddy!" she protested. She still called him that, because Leila had taken an inflexible stand against her early experiments in using his first name. Melody called her "Leila," though.
"We don't have much time," he said, rocking her gently as he stood behind her with his arms around her waist.
"I'm starving to death!" she cried, taking a wolfish bite of her peanut butter sandwich to prove it.
She wasn't in a bad humor. Even while she protested, she was rubbing her little ass against the hot, hard bulge in his pants. She rested her head back against his shoulder. He could feel her continuing to chew while he moved his hands up to press her budding breasts.
"What are these? Mosquito bites?" he teased.
"You know what they are."
"I'd better check them out."
He undid the back of her ruffled blouse. She never wore a bra, although Leila said that she ought to. Her skin was warm, perspiring slightly, as he slid his hands into the gap and held a breast like a little green apple in each hand. He kissed the long, bare back of her neck. She took another bite of her sandwich.
She permitted him to push her panties down, and then she stepped out of them when they fell around her ankles. She leaned against him, her ass still moving in a steady, vibratory gyration against his stiff prick. He tore at his belt and zipper and thrust down his trousers and shorts, unable to stand another instant of their painful confinement. His cock sprang out, hot and hard and dripping, and he slipped it under her skirt to rub against the bare skin of her ass.
Her sandwich finished, she licked her fingers. Then she flipped her skirt up. She spread her feet wider on the floor and leaned forward, her hands against the door of the refrigerator. The pose, the invitation, was almost shockingly direct, and it was intensified by the lecherous little smile she gave him over her shoulder.
Madness, maybe, but he couldn't wait to go and put on a rubber. He had to accept her invitation, he had to have her then and there.
He crouched slightly at the knees, nudging his cock upward against her cunt. He was surprised to find her wet and open and ready for his entrance. Hungry or not, her degree of sexual arousal was a match for his own. She let out a deep moan as his hard cock slid up into her pussy with the ease of a knife going through warm butter.
The day was warm and sunny, but oppressive with the threat of rain. The kitchen would darken as a thundercloud obscured the sun, then brighten suddenly. The birds seemed to be singing more loudly, more insistently than usual. All these impressions were engraved in his mind. He could see the white door of the refrigerator where Melody leaned, see the worn linoleum beneath her feet, smell the charred odor of coffee that he'd recently let boil over on the stove.
He clasped her slim hips in both hands, watching his big, red cock as it slipped in and out of her tight little cunt. Even though her tits had started to develop, her ass still gave no hint of womanly fullness. It was trim and neat and spare, muscled like hard rubber under her glowing skin. She clenched and unclenched its cheeks as he rocked from the knees, pushing his prick in and out of her pussy.
Shrugging and wriggling, she managed to get her blouse all the way off and let it drop to the floor. He explored upward with one of his hands, fondling her little breasts with the rock-hard nubs. She smiled a tight-lipped smile of pleasure, her eyes closed as she rested with her cheek against the refrigerator.
The room darkened. John thought it was only another cloud drifting before the sun. It wasn't until he heard the half-strangled, agonized sound, a cross between a sob and a scream, that he realized the shadow had been cast by a person standing in the doorway. He looked over his shoulder. Through the screen door he could dimly discern a figure that was unmistakably Leila's, but he couldn't read her expression with the sun at her back. She gave him no chance to. She turned and blundered away from the back steps. He heard dry, retching sounds.
"Finish it," Melody hissed when he made a move to pull out. "Finish it!"
He could never have predicted his reaction to such a situation. He might have imagined that he would have broken off the contact and pursued Leila with some incoherent and foolish attempt to justify himself. He never would have imagined doing what he did in fact do: he blotted Leila's retching sobs from his ears and continued to fuck Melody.
It was a fast, hard, aggressive fuck, lacking in tenderness, but she loved it. She humped her ass back against him, matching the furious, desperate pace he set. Her moans rapidly escalated to orgasmic wails.
"Fuck me, Daddy!" she almost screamed. "Fuck me fuck me fuck me!"
He was fully aware that her screams were reaching Leila's ears, more than half suspicious that they were being exaggerated or even manufactured for Leila's benefit, but he made no effort to keep her quiet. Leila knew. Nothing mattered, nothing except continuing to fuck Melody.
He screwed her almost violently, with a violence born of desperation, and she responded to it. Her voice rose again, and this time he was certain that Leila and her reaction to the sounds were far from Melody's mind. Even as she sagged against the refrigerator, gasping for breath, exhausted by the force of her orgasm, he felt the hot seed spurting through his cock.
He stood back, buckling his belt, while she rearranged her clothes. His mind raced like an engine out of gear, churning out a thousand possible courses of action, all of them obviously foolish.
He laughed almost hysterically at Melody's attempt to be utterly cool and nonchalant: "Do you suppose there are any cookies in the cupboard?"
Leila lay in the yard for a long time, face down in the grass. At first she lay there sobbing, but then she merely lay there. John's efforts to coax her into the house were futile, but at last she came in of her own accord, dry-eyed, and went about the task of making supper with cold and unspeaking precision.
But silence was not Leila's strong suit. She was a talker. She liked to discuss any problem from every possible angle, even a problem like this one. She was sometimes able to see angles to problems that other people just couldn't discern. Talking, examining, weighing, she seldom acted.
The only real action she took in this case was to exclude John from the bedroom. She made him sleep on the couch. Late at night, when he was certain Leila was asleep, he would slip into Melody's bedroom.
She talked about sending Melody away somewhere. She talked about psychiatric help for John. She talked about leaving him. But she didn't do anything. John tried to look appropriately tormented by guilt as he encouraged her to talk, not wanting to say much himself.
His memories were becoming painful. He tried to wipe them out and concentrate all his attention on the present, where he lay with his tongue flickering in and out of Melody's asshole. The present was delicious. No one was going to burst in on them. There was no more Leila to find them out. But there would be Carol, thrust into the same position Leila had held ... perhaps running the same danger? He pushed thoughts of Carol forcibly from his mind.
"I wonder if you could fit your cock in my ass," Melody purred. "Your tongue feels so good in there."
John hesitated. He'd never practiced that perversion with Melody, nor with anyone else, for that matter. He knew that it was possible to fuck a girl in the ass, though. He'd even written about it, back in the days when he'd been writing pornographic novels: whenever his characters were at a loss for anything else to do, they engaged in anal intercourse. Despite his objections, Melody had read all those dirty books he'd written.
"Let's see if you're ready," she said, twisting around to look at him. She smiled when she saw that his cock was stiff and hard. "Oh, my, so you are' Let me get it wet first,"
She coiled back with the ease of a snake, rested on her elbow, and began giving his prick a soft, wet massage with her extended tongue. She coated it all over with her glistening saliva, and her feather-light licks made it surge up to a new peak of throbbing rigidity.
"It's a lot bigger than my tongue," he observed. "Do you really want to try?"
"Of course," she mumbled, still licking. "I want to try everything. See if you can do it now."
She turned back and lay full length on the bed, readjusting the pillow beneath her loins that propped her ass up at a provocative angle. She reached back with both hands to spread the cleft of her ass open. Even the little pink mouth of her anus opened slightly under the pressure, but it still looked like it was going to be an impossibly tight squeeze.
Recalling that session in the kitchen, John was struck by how remarkably she'd developed in the past two years or so. Then her ass could have been described as even boyish, but now it was unmistakably feminine-not yet womanly, but decidedly girlish in its plump perfection of curvature. He could see, too, that she hadn't been entirely untouched by the sun, despite her efforts not to get a deep tan. When she parted the cleavage of her buttocks, it showed an even milkier shade of white.
He pressed the hot nozzle of his cock, purple with its engorged load of lust, against the wrinkled pink hole. She pushed her ass up slightly higher, spread her legs a little wider, tempting him in. He shuddered with his hunger as he inserted just the tip into her anus.
"Don't take all day," she murmured. "Just see if you can stick it in my ass."
He shrank from the thought of hurting her, but her words encouraged him to push harder. He felt her wince, though, before the head of his cock was fully buried in her rectum, and that made him stop.
"I thought those hokey fuckbooks you used to write were a load of bullshit," she said. "It can't be done. Come on. I'll tell you when I want you to stop."
He wiggled up more closely behind her on his knees, and his prick sank more deeply as he altered the angle of his penetration. Now the head was completely sunk, but the length of the shaft still loomed outside the tight, inflamed ring of her asshole. It seemed impossible that the hole could stretch any further to accept the thickest part of his swollen cock.
But still she didn't tell him to stop. Her clutching fingers pulled her ass wider, trying to make room for the total immersion of his hard tool. He shoved harder, even though the going got tougher with each inch, even though the tight squeeze of her secret depths was beginning to hurt him as much as it must be hurting her.
Nevertheless, the pain to him was secondary to the tingling delights that the delicious pressure sent through his hard cock. It was tighter even than the first time he'd fucked her, and it reminded him of that ineffable experience.
"Is that all of it?" she murmured.
He was tempted to tell her that it was, that she'd succeeded in taking every inch of his cock up her ass, in order to spare her further discomfort; but she frustrated his chivalrous impulse by reaching back to feel for herself what progress he'd made, and her fingertips told her that almost half the length of his swollen rod was still out in the cold.
"Oh, shit," she muttered.
"Shall I stop? Wouldn't you rather just fuck the regular way?"
"Maybe you ought to get me those things like they had in The Story of O, where the girl has to wear bigger and bigger things in her ass until she can really get buggered," giggled Melody, who had thwarted her father's sporadic attempts to guide her reading habits into respectable lines.
He began slowly to withdraw, but she squealed with impatience. "No, keep going! I know you can do it. There's just a little trick to it that I can't seem to get right, I can feel it. Keep going."
He pushed in again. The squeeze was just as hot and dry as before, but he sensed a new and yielding softness, as if she had indeed mastered the trick of relaxing her asshole for the intrusion of his prick. He clutched her thighs and pulled her towards him as he pushed harder against the resistance of the tight hole.
He began to realize that in buggering his daughter he not only had to overcome the seemingly impenetrable obstacle of her anal virginity, but that he was also in a race against time. The pressure of her tight rectum was building his excitement up to explosive force, and he began to despair that he would succeed in getting all the way in before he came. He pushed even harder than ever. She gasped, but she said nothing to make him stop.
"I think ... I think that's it," she said, once more exploring with her fingers.
She was right. His pubic hair was pressed into the crease of her ass, his balls were squeezing firmly against her juicy cunt, and every last inch of his big prick had been buried in. her asshole.
His excitement allowed him to rest for only a second. Now that he was in there, he felt an eager urge to ream out this new and untried hole, to fuck her just as vigorously as ever he'd fucked her in the cunt. But the tightness and dryness of the hot passage wouldn't permit that. He had to plod when he wanted to gallop toward the glimmering orgasm that he could sense coming nearer and nearer with each successive stroke. That mild frustration was like an extra spice to his pleasure, and his excitement fed and grew on its difficulty to consummate itself.
He had forgotten all about his efforts to make it easier for Melody, and he felt a twinge of guilt when he remembered. But she seemed to be in no discomfort. On the contrary, her full lips were curved in a tight smile as she lay on the pillow and presented her ass for his hard thrusts and plunges.
He gripped her tighter as the glimmer came closer, until it enveloped him completely and became transformed into the boiling eruption of his overheated cock. Gout after gout of simmering gism spurted and splurged into her rectum, at last giving the dry hole the lubrication it needed. Melody sighed with contentment as the thrusting of his prick became easier to take, and he found that the creamy grease of his orgasm allowed him to fuck her just as fast as he wanted to while the last jets pumped out.
"I hope it doesn't work like an enema," Melody said, startling him with the straightforward practicality of her concern. "Do you suppose?"
"I ... I don't know."
"You mean you never did that to anybody?" she demanded, looking back over her shoulder with a malicious smile.
"Nope," he said, not wanting to meet her eye as he pulled the wet length of his dwindling cock out of her rectum.
"Well. I'm glad I could be the first for you for something," she said seriously. Before he could explore the fact that he was touched by this sentiment, she added with a giggle: "But it just goes to show that your dirty books were a lot of crap."
"You downgrade the human imagination," he said, looking for a cigarette. "Henry James said that even a cloistered girl, if she had the novelistic imagination, could write a novel about army life just from hearing part of a soldier's conversation."
He lit two cigarettes, handed her one. Remembering, he got up and went to the window to see what had become of his neighbor, but Burke was nowhere in sight. He pressed close to the screen, willing to believe that he might be crouching outside just beneath it, but he wasn't. Maybe, he thought hopefully, a fish has caught him.
As if the dismal train of thought were waiting for him where it had begun, he found himself thinking again about Leila. After chewing over the problem of his incestuous behavior from every possible angle, she decided on a course of action: Melody would go and stay indefinitely with Leila's sister's family in Kansas; he would undergo psychoanalysis.
Both ideas were unacceptable. He didn't want to send Melody off to Kansas, nor did he think she could be persuaded to go. Psychiatry was abhorrent to him. It hadn't helped Jean, Melody's mother, and he was afraid that his writing talent might be damaged or destroyed if he let some witchdoctor tinker with his brain. But the alternative that Leila proposed was exposure and criminal prosecution.
They talked about it some more, but Leila's mind, at long last, was obviously and irrevocably made up. He told Melody about her stepmother's plan, and she opposed it as vehemently as he had expected she would. They both tried to keep Leila talking, to keep action deferred.
This was the way things stood by midsummer. Absorbed with their own problems, they hardly noted the newspaper accounts of the virulent form of encephalitis that had killed ten or twelve people in the area that year. Such deadly outbreaks of the mosquito-borne disease were relatively rare, and the story got intensive newspaper coverage.
Then Leila got it. At least that's what the coroner said, after she died in the most agonizing and horrible convulsions imaginable, only a few hours after the first symptoms were noted. John did not feel obliged to mention to the coroner that the same symptoms were not inconsistent with strychnine poisoning. Nor did he feel obliged to mention, after Leila's speedy cremation, his discovery that a box of rat poison which he'd noticed in the basement of the bungalow soon after they'd rented it was now missing.
Chapter Five
Once the anchorage had been cleared and the blue waters of the bay stretched relatively empty before them, Melody opened up the outboard engine. Carol felt a moment of queasiness when the bow of the square-snouted fiberglass runabout lifted high out of the water, but she assured herself that she'd never been subject to seasickness and wasn't going to start now.
It couldn't really be seasickness, anyway, because the bay was like a mirror. More properly, it was fear of their speed. But Melody looked more than competent. If the speed gave her any kind of daredevil exhilaration, she didn't show it. She sat at the helm like a little statue.
She was in no hurry to start working on her tan. She was swathed in an ankle-length terry-cloth robe, a floppy straw hat-secured by a ribbon under her chin against the slipstream-and loopy, opaque sunglasses. She looked vaguely sinister, like something out of a Fellini movie. Carol finally decided that this obscure area of menace was a hangover from her encounter yesterday with Beau Boulton, the sheriff's deputy: the utter impassivity of Melody's face and the concealment of the sunglasses were reminiscent of Beau's facade.
Carol had no quarrel with the sun. Deeply basted in oil, she stretched out in a floral, black and green bikini and invited it to do its worst.
Her hope of getting a quiet afternoon alone with Melody in some secluded place where they would be free from interruption had been rewarded as well as if she'd planned it in detail. It was Melody who suggested that they go to her "private" place, a little island in the bay, for their picnic; and she even had the means at hand, a speedboat that Carol hadn't previously heard about.
Turning up at John's house this morning, Carol had half expected that the date would have been forgotten; that Melody would have gone to school. But the girl was waiting for her, even seemed eager to go.
Even Melody's truancy was partly explained-although now Carol wondered if the explanation hadn't been made up on the spur of the moment-at an odd leave taking scene at the house.
John was saying goodbye to them at the door when a neighbor whom Carol hadn't met sauntered over and joined the group. John introduced him-grudgingly, Carol thought-as Ken Burke.
The scene was odd because of some inexplicable undercurrent of hostility between the two men. Burke had turned on his charm like a light bulb for her and Melody, but she sensed that all of his attention was really focused oil John's slightest words and actions; and John had seemed unwilling to be more than coldly civil. She supposed that John was being overly protective of his daughter, perhaps wary of the attention to his fianc�e, too, because Burke came on like a fading beach boy on the make. But that didn't explain Burke's attitude toward John.
"How's the notorious hockey-player?" he'd asked Melody. "You must be making quite a name for yourself at the high school."
"It's a pretty miserable excuse for a school," Melody explained coolly. "They don't want to admit that by skipping me two grades, like they ought to, but they're letting me work on special projects. So I get a lot of free time."
Burke's charm-boyish grin, sun-crinkled blue eyes, sun-streaked hair-didn't seem to work well on Melody, but of course one could never tell with Melody. Her characteristic facial expression suggested that she'd recently arrived from another planet and didn't find the natives of this one especially interesting.
Later, as they were leaving, she'd heard Burke suggesting that he and John do some fishing, "now that he had the ladies out of his hair," and John had mumbled something about having work to do. She would have liked to ask Melody about their coolness toward their neighbor, but the high-pitched roar of the engine made casual conversation impossible.
It wasn't long before Melody had to slow down for the first of the narrow channels between the islands. They didn't look too inviting: half-submerged, jungly, with loopings of Spanish moss hanging from the branches. After a while it was difficult to tell which was the dominant element, earth or water: whether they were traversing a group of islands in a bag or a series of intricate waterways in a body of land.
Melody seemed to know where she was going, which was utterly amazing to Carol. Some of the bends in the channels-or ditches-seemed to turn at right angles, threatening at any minute to trap their boat hopelessly. Once or twice Melody steered confidently toward a green wall, the next leg of the channel revealing itself only at the last possible moment. Carol found herself ducking low branches and loops of moss.
"You seem to know your way around this place," Carol observed, now that they were moving at a crawl and conversation was possible.
"Sometimes I like to be alone," Melody explained. "That takes a little doing, sometimes."
That was the closest thing to a confidence that Carol had ever received from the girl. It suggested a lonely child, unable to relate to her contemporaries, perhaps confused by her own awakening sex drives and a little terrified by the attentions of boys. She decided it would be better not to press for further confidences-for the moment. But she felt that her plan to win Melody's friendship was getting off to a splendid start.
Melody steered straight for another tangled wall of vegetation. This time there was no doubt at all in Carol's mind that they were going to hit it, and she couldn't restrain a squeak of dismay. But Melody found an opening that Carol hadn't noticed until they were in it. They executed another sharp turn, and this time the hull scraped something as it squeezed through. Carol cast a covert glance at Melody, ashamed of her little outburst, but the girl's face showed nothing.
Carol turned back to the bow-and cried out again, this time with wonder and pleasure. She didn't know how they'd done it, but they were floating in a green bowl some fifty yards across. Opposite their point of entry was a pure white beach. The little bay and its beach were surrounded by walls of mangroves that looked impenetrable, and Carol could no longer pick out the spot where they'd entered.
"This is ... paradise!" Carol exclaimed.
"Beware of the snake," Melody said dryly.
That touch of cynicism made Carol feel a little silly, but she wasn't going to retract her description. Trite as the word was, it was the only way to describe this perfect little jewel of a place, hidden and unspoiled even in the midst of a chaos of commercial desolation and unremarkable swampland. Carol had objected to the road-houses and honkytonks, the trailer parks and lagoon developments, but at the same time she'd held no brief for whatever the land must have looked like in its pristine state: until now.
Melody cut the engine when they had just enough momentum to drift in to the beach. Carol stepped out into shallow water while the girl secured a line to a tree. She gazed around, consciously breathing deeply: the same air she'd been breathing all day, but it seemed to have a new freshness and sparkle to it.
"Let's get the food in the shade," Melody suggested.
Carol had bought a cooler for their lunch: much too big, but the only thing she could find in the local five-and-ten on short notice. Fortunately it was light, made of foam plastic. She and Melody carried it up the beach to a shaded spot. She had half expected the beauty of the beach, close-up, would be marred by discarded beer cans, the charred sites of old campfires, the leavings of other picnics. But it wasn't.
"You must be the only one who knows about this place," Carol marveled.
Melody shrugged. "Must be some old swamp-rats who know every inch of the bay. But I've never seen one of them while I've been here. It's not the sort of place somebody would stumble onto accidentally."
"I was really wishing for a place like this. I want to even up my tan."
"You could do that on the beach near our house," Melody said with a laugh. "I never wear a suit when nobody's around."
"Well. You never know when somebody's going to turn up," Carol said.
She thought that sounded a little too stodgy even while she was saving it, so she didn't wait to hear Melody's reaction but walked back to the water, unhooking her bra as she went. She tossed it into the boat, then stood indecisively, ankle-deep in the water, for a moment. She turned back to Melody.
"You sure no one's likely to barge in?" she called. "Or lurk around in the shrubbery and watch?"
"I'm watching. Shall I turn my back?"
Carol made a wry face at her, then peeled her bikini without further hesitation. Melody sat in the shade of a tree, still bundled in her robe and hat and glasses, hugging her knees. To Carol's eye, she looked touchingly like a little girl rigged out as a glamorous spy in her mother's discards. She was smoking a cigarette ROW, and that seemed the final touch to the childish charade.
"Aren't you coming in?" Carol called.
"Sure."
She ground out the cigarette, then got up and shed her costume. She was wearing the most abbreviated version of the string bikini that Carol had ever seen, but not for long. It soon floated down to the pile of her clothing and Melody padded down the beach.
Carol had seen her wandering around the house in advanced states of undress, but she'd never seen her naked before. She was amazed to see what a well-developed fifteen-year-old she was. At that age, Carol would have given her right arm for a body like that. Even now, she found herself standing up a little straighter and sucking in the tummy that she'd previously persuaded herself was virtually flat.
She noted one incongruity: Melody apparently had no hair in her pubic area.
Carol must have stared a little too long, or perhaps her perplexity was written on her face, because Melody said bluntly, "I shave it. So I can wear that bikini."
Carol felt her cheeks bum, and she turned away. The girl had a remarkable facility for making her seem silly and awkward and incompetent. It was Melody who knew where to go, how to handle the boat; it was Melody who made dry comments to squelch her enthusiasm, who suggested putting the picnic lunch in the shade; and now this: with the total result that Carol felt like the child being taken for an outing by the responsible adult.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to stare at you."
Melody giggled. "That's okay. You show me yours and I'll show you mine."
Carol didn't know how to respond to that jibe, if such it was. She turned and dove into the water, swimming quickly out to the center of the pool. She turned on her hack and floated, The solitude, the warmth of the sun, the support of the water on her nude body, all these sensual pleasures combined to make her little gaffes seem unimportant; and she found it easy to regain her composure.
Melody surfaced beside her, wearing a bathing cap. "Alligators like a muddy bottom," she observed.
Carol was not about to let her newly won composure disintegrate over that remark. She said, not unkindly: "You really should have had a big brother. So you could have gotten all that teasing out of your system."
Melody laughed. Her smile could illuminate her face, and Carol thought It was a shame she didn't do it more often. "I wasn't teasing you, I was reassuring you. The bottom here is sand, Turn over and look."
Carol turned. She could see the white, sandy bottom through the water. Now Melody dove. She went down surprisingly far; Carol would have guessed the bottom was much closer. Melody looked as lithe and sleek, her movements beneath the surface were as strong and graceful, as if she were some creature born to the water. She curved gracefully upward, her arms stretched back like wings as she rose to the surface.
"Beautiful," Carol said, and she realized she was talking about Melody as much as she was talking about the setting. She decided to expand on her remark: "You're an incredibly beautiful girl."
"That's what John tells me," she said, with a lack of inflection that dismissed the compliment.
"Every girl's father tells her that. It's only natural."
"Oh."
"My father told me that when I looked like a scarecrow, and I'm sure he meant it. But in your case it's quite accurate."
"I can't see you looking like a scarecrow," Melody laughed.
"I did. When I was your age, my measurements were twenty-twenty-twenty. And I was five feet, eight inches tall. And the way I wore my hair made me look like an Irish setter, but I couldn't think of anything better to do with it."
"Does John tell you that you're beautiful?"
Carol was taken aback by that question, but she knew immediately that she couldn't expect intimacy without returning it. Maybe it was a rude question, but children were notorious for those: and she shouldn't forget that Melody was a child.
"Not in so many words," Carol said, trying to be honest. "He sort of takes me apart. Tells me I have a pretty nose, or beautiful eyes."
"Why doesn't he sleep with you?"
This, definitely, was going too far, especially since Carol could think of no good answer. With a great effort, she succeeded in concealing her irritation, but that still didn't help her find an answer.
"I think it's because he doesn't want to set me a bad example," Melody said. "He worries about things like that."
Carol looked at her. But she might have been holding a conversation with an intelligent creature that had just come up from its home on the floor of the bay, for all the emotional clues she could derive from Melody's expression. She was disconcerted by the girl's insight. She herself had never put it quite so simply and directly, but it seemed the best explanation of John's behavior.
Even though she agreed with her, Carol found herself being less than candid by asking: "What makes you so sure it's not my decision?"
"The way you look at him. And the way yon get nervous when he's around. And the fact that you're in love with him, and that you're a woman, and that we're not living in the Nineteenth Century. I hope you don't think I'm being rude or disrespectful or anything, but you look like you could use a good fuck."
And before Carol's outrage and indignation could boil over, Melody flipped backward and submerged. She suppressed the urge to follow her, to seize her and give her hair a few good yanks. It infuriated her that this conceited little brat should tell her ... should tell her the truth.
Carol dove, but she found that she couldn't go all the way to the bottom, as Melody had. She wished she'd brought snorkeling equipment, at least a face mask. The visibility was perfect, but the water in her eyes blurred her vision.
On second thought, she wished she'd brought John, instead of his irreverent and disquietingly perceptive daughter. She certainly could use a good fuck, and this would be the ideal place for it. She began to imagine lying on the hidden beach in the sun, with John ... She tried hard to turn off that line of thought. The same kind of urgent, unexpectedly voracious sexual hunger that had swept over her yesterday morning returned, this time even more powerfully.
Carol swam back to the beach, where Melody was already toweling herself dry. She stopped at the boat, picking up her blanket and towel and beach bag. She was determined to take issue with the girl's last remark, even though her strategy was yet unformed. It was one thing to exchange confidences, quite another to be made fun of.
She reflected that a peeping Tom lurking in the undergrowth would have hit the jackpot with Melody. She stood in the middle of the beach with her legs apart, toweling herself thoroughly, sensuously. She rubbed the towel against her crotch far longer than was necessary merely to get herself dry. It was verging on an obscene performance when she suddenly stopped. The light filtering through the leaves cast a dazzling, changing patchwork on her taut, creamy skin. Carol found herself thinking of that time in college when she and another girl-but that had just been a youthful experiment, the result of loneliness and innocence, it hadn't meant anything, and she refused to think about it.
"That was a pretty lousy remark," Carol said, busying herself with spreading out the blanket. "It was unfair and uncalled-for."
"And untrue?" Melody prompted slyly.
"God damn it!" Carol cried, thoroughly angry with herself for her inability to control her giggling. After a pause, she managed to maintain her calm as she said: "Let's just stay off that subject, shall we?"
"It's an interesting subject," Melody said, "I'm sorry if I made it ... too personal. But I was sort of hoping that-well, if we became friends and all, that we might be able to talk about things that I can't very well talk about with John."
Carol felt a painful wave of remorse. This was precisely the sort of thing she'd been hoping Melody would say, precisely the sort of relationship she'd wanted to establish with her, and she'd very nearly blown it with her ill-timed prudishness. She smiled tenderly as she met Melody's slant-eyed, enigmatic gaze. The girl didn't withdraw when she took her arm lightly and kissed her on the cheek.
"I'm sorry. You were absolutely right. It's just that-well, that I wouldn't have worded it quite that way, that's all. You sort of shocked me.
"It's just a word," Melody said. "When John was writing dirty books, he said he was doing it only to liberate the English language."
Their friendship seemed to be progressing beautifully. Melody had slipped her arm casually around Carol's waist and was partly leaning against her. She was glad the girl had no inhibitions about warm, friendly, physical contact.
"Of course," Melody continued when Carol made no comment, "he was just doing it to make money. It's the only reason he ever writes anything."
"Aren't you being a little harsh?"
"I think it's a sensible attitude," Melody said. "I've met these friends of his who bust their humps painting pictures or practicing the guitar or writing novels, and they never will make a cent out of it because they're no good. He may be a hypocrite, but he isn't a dope."
Carol murmured non-committally as she lay down on the blanket and began rummaging in her bag for sun-tan oil. Melody had given her something to think seriously about. She was painfully aware of John's puritanical attitude toward her money, but she had nevertheless hoped that she would somehow be able to persuade him to let her support him for a short while so he could work on something more serious than the junk he wrote for a living. Now she wondered about that. She might be undermining his character, destroying his talent, by subsidizing him. Maybe his vehemence in denouncing "rich women's lapdogs" was sparked by the fact that such a Tie was a temptation to him, a distraction from the difficult task he had set for himself.
Suddenly, Carol had an inspiration. Why couldn't she give most of her money away to some charity or other worthwhile cause before their marriage? She could keep it a secret from John, then tell him as a special surprise on their wedding night. The money would no longer be a source of tension between them, and John would have the satisfaction of supporting his , family solely through his own efforts. It seemed like a marvelous idea, but also a drastic one; she would have to give it a lot more thought.
"Want me to do you?" Melody asked.
"Oh, what?"
"The suntan lotion. You don't want to bum those places you're trying to even up, do you?"
Carol laughed. It would be an embarrassing honeymoon indeed if the places covered by her bikini were too sensitive to be touched. She wiggled facedown on the blanket until the sand beneath it had assumed a suitably comfortable depression, they lay still.
"You have such soft skin," Melody observed as she worked the oil into her shoulder blades with a gentle, kneading pressure.
"You're the one who needs the suntan lotion," Carol observed belatedly. "Shouldn't I-"
"Don't worry, I'll lie in the shade. Just relax."
That wasn't hard to do. The exertion of her recent swim, the baking warmth of the sun on her nude body, Melody's deep massage-all these things combined to lull Carol into a torpid, dreamlike state. She stretched her arms before her as Melody slowly rubbed the oil down around her armpits and the sides of her breasts.
She acknowledged that her earlier sexual arousal hadn't subsided completely. It had merely been simmering secretly, waiting to boil up again. Melody's lingering caresses on her breasts and arms and back gave it a fresh impetus.
She didn't dare tell the girl to stop; and she knew that she didn't want her to stop. She decided to give way to it, to let it run its own course, to enjoy the delicious sensations without examining them. She sighed, smiling.
"Feels good?" Melody purred.
"Mmmm. So good."
One of her occasional sexual fantasies began unreeling unbidden in her mind. Usually, in the fantasy, her car had broken down on a lonely road. A man or men stopped, ostensibly to help her, but they would take her into the woods and rape her. Midway through the rape, she would begin to enjoy it against her will.
It was different this time. The fantasy had confused itself with the memory of the sheriff's deputy who'd stopped her yesterday, on a road as suitably lonely as any in her daydreams. It wasn't the pintsized Storm Trooper behind the dark glasses, though, it was-good heavens. It was that overaged beach boy she'd met this morning, Ken Burke. He forced her to take off all her clothes at gunpoint, and then he handcuffed her hands behind her back. He was forcing her to blow him, kneeling in front of his booted feet.
He wasn't gentle. He was shoving his cock roughly into her mouth, cursing her and calling her a dirty whore because she wasn't sucking hard enough or using her tongue the way he wanted her to use it. She licked her lip, and the salt of perspiration reminded her forcibly of the salty taste and cheesy aroma of a cock.
Carol parted her legs slightly as Melody worked lower, below her waist, pressing the oil into her skin. She tried hard to reshuffle the fantasy, to give the cop's role to John, but she succeeded only in giving the rapist a disappointing facelessness.
He shot into her mouth, making her gag, but he ordered her to swallow every drop of his come and suck for more. It dribbled down over her lip a she continued to ram his prick in and out of her mouth. At least it was over-but it wasn't, He was still hard, and he forced her to lie on her belly while he fucked her from behind. She could feel his hands on her ass ... Melody's hands, lingering, kneading the cheeks, sometimes slipping down between her thighs. Her legs opened a little wider.
"Roll over," Melody said. 'I'll do the rest of you."
"I can do the rest-"
"No, let me. It's fun."
Carol wondered how she could possibly stand the touch of Melody's hands on her breasts- and equally, how she could stand not having that touch. She couldn't refuse. She rolled over, shielding her eyes against the sun with her hand. Melody straddled her waist with her knees. She poured oil into one of her palms and slowly, lovingly began to rub one of Carol's breasts. Carol gasped.
The deputy had satisfied his lust for that position, he was now lying on top of her, fucking her vigorously. She was responding, arching her back, moaning. He was no longer faceless. The face behind the opaque glasses was Melody's. They were kissing, embracing passionately, and Melody was masturbating her urgently.
She wrenched her mind away from the abhorrent fantasy and opened her eyes. Without thinking, she'd been stroking Melody's hip and thigh. She made herself stop. But her hand continued to rest on the girl's muscular thigh where it had stopped. Melody was massaging both breasts-caressing them, actually, with her oily hands.
"Please," Carol whispered in a very small voice. "Please-no more."
Melody kissed her lightly on the lips. Carol found herself wishing that the kiss hadn't been quite so light, that it had lasted longer. Melody's oily fingers traced the surfaces of her nipples.
Carol again began stroking Melody's hips, using both hands this time, smoothing them down the hairless silkiness of her thighs. Melody's hands worked lower, stroking her belly now, working lower to her thighs, moving inward between her thighs. Carol's legs spread as if moving of their own accord.
This was unthinkable. This was madness. She was seducing a teenager-and not just any teenager, which would have been bad enough, but her own prospective stepdaughter. She was drifting into a perversion that combined the worst aspects of lesbianism and pedophilia and incest.
"Stop, Melody, stop right now! We can't-"
Melody silenced her with a kiss. This time it wasn't a light touch of the lips. It was a hungering, open-mouthed, insistent questing. Carol responded, and she felt herself growing dizzy as the kiss aroused her to a feverish pitch. She clutched at Melody's ass, stroked her back, caressed her tits, and she did it hastily, fearfully, as if Melody's skin could burn her. The girl's caresses were surer, more steady, and their goal was obvious as her hands moved closer and closer to Carol's cunt.
"No, Melody, no ... " Carol moaned.
"Just let me touch it. Please. Just see how good it feels," Melody whispered urgently.
Carol no longer had to fantasize as she felt the touch on her pussy that she'd been so long lusting for. Melody's lips had moved down to her nipples, her tongue was weaving slow, circular patterns on their pebbly-hard surfaces, and her fingers were stroking her clitoris with steadily increasing pressure. Carol stroked Melody's breasts, marveling at their rubbery firmness and satiny softness.
"Oh, honey, this is so wrong!" Carol groaned, trying to convince the other girl without doing anything to stop what was happening.
"You want it. So do I. It feels good. How can it be wrong?" Melody murmured, her lips brushing Carol's navel as she slid lower.
Carol braced herself up on her elbows and stared down in what she told herself was horrified fascination. She was fascinated, certainly, but she found it difficult to feel horrified as she watched the coronet of Melody's gold braids sinking lower and lower, watched the tip of her tongue emerge from her lips like the pink nose of a shy kitten, watched it flickering and questing in her red pubic hair ... and felt it.
She twisted downward, trying to touch Melody's cunt with her mouth. The girl anticipated her desire and came to meet her halfway on the blanket. She lay on her side, her knee raised, the sole of one bare foot propped against her thigh, her hairless crotch open and inviting Carol's kisses.
Carol licked it slowly, firmly, trying to equal the skill of Melody's lascivious kisses. It had a clean,, salt-water taste from her recent swim. It began to seep sticky fluid almost as soon as Carol began licking it, and she hugged the girl's hips tightly as she began licking faster and more eagerly.
As Carol licked harder and began sliding her tongue into Melody's hot hole, she was surprised to discover that she was no virgin. She was a little disappointed, too, because this fact threw all her previous speculations about Melody's character out of alignment. It didn't jibe with her disdain for her contemporaries, with the lonely life suggested by her too-early maturity and sophistication.
On the other hand, maybe this fact did fit. Maybe she'd been raped at an early age, and maybe that's why she clung so closely to her father: for protection against a menacing world, The even simpler and far less melodramatic explanation that she'd lost her virginity through experiments in masturbation would also be consistent with her antisocial attitudes.
Carol wondered, too, how Melody had ever learned to eat a cunt the way she was doing. No man had ever eaten her pussy with such skillful tenderness; no woman either, she thought, guiltily remembering her collegiate experience with sapphism. Melody's tongue flickered like a butterfly dancing on a flower as it probed and tickled and stroked all the hot, oozing surfaces of Carol's tingling quim. But that was easily explained, too: even if Melody had never engaged in cunnilingus, either actively or passively, she would certainly know what would feel good on her own cunt, and she was able to translate that knowledge into practice.
Carol tried to keep her mind occupied with these little problems, not wanting to let it dwell on the horror of what she was actually doing. She knew that if she permitted herself to think about what she was doing, she would stop, and she didn't want to stop. She clung hard to Melody's reassurance: that it felt good, that they both wanted it, so therefore it couldn't be wrong.
She clung even harder to Melody's ass, and before long she wasn't thinking about anything at all: just feeling. She let her body do her thinking for her as she rooted greedily in Melody's shaven cunt, scooping out the hot juices with her tongue.
They rolled in their tempestuous embrace, and Carol felt the hot sand under her naked back as they left the blanket. The burning heat, the fact that the sand was clinging to her oiled skin and getting in her hair-none of that was at all important. Only the insistent slurping and tonguing at her cunt comprised reality, only the vision of Melody's own pussy above her face.
Melody sank down on her, swabbing her lips and mouth and chin with her steaming quim. Carol responded, flicking her quivering tongue here, there, everywhere in the juicy pink confection. Her legs waved lazily above Melody's head like the wings of a moth skewered on a pin.
Carol wouldn't have believed it possible, but she was coming, coming as she'd never come before. Her body was lighting up, glowing, expanding. She felt like one of those see-through plastic models of a human being, with all the veins and nerves outlined in color: except that the components of her body were outlined in lurid neon traceries of pleasure. She felt as if something were battering against the cage of her body, struggling to be free and fly, and then the key was found and it flew.
Chapter Six
Lunch was eaten in silence, after another swim. Carol had packed fried chicken, potato salad and coleslaw, and, as an afterthought, a bottle of Chablis. In packing the wine, she hadn't known whether Melody would drink it; but she had thought it might loosen her up, make her less inaccessible, if she did. The irony of that made her laugh when she unpacked it.
Carol found the silence oppressive at first, but it didn't seem to bother Melody. She had retreated behind her mask. But then, while she was licking her fingers, she caught Carol's eye and burst into a sudden grin. Carol felt better after that.
Carol wanted to have an earnest discussion after lunch. Melody wanted to make love. They made love, a long, leisurely session that was even more overwhelming than the first time.
Returning across the tranquil bay at dusk, Carol felt miserable. She didn't know how she could ever face John again. She was a filthy, despicable pervert. To marry the father of this girl-to live in the same house with her as her stepmother, tortured by temptation-she could never do it. She would have to leave tomorrow, go somewhere John would never find her.
But even while she was calling herself filthy and warped and twisted, she kept returning to scenes burned in her memory from the afternoon: the glow of Melody's flesh, her sly glances, her knowing fingers. She saw her swimming, diving, her flesh sleek as a seal's. Leaving John would mean leaving Melody. She couldn't stifle a sob, but she was sure the sound of the motor had covered it.
Melody was no help. She didn't want to talk about it. She simply existed, accepted, and Carol had the feeling she might as well .speak in Chinese when she tried to talk to her about guilt or morality or resolutions to resist future temptation.
Maybe Melody's attitude was the correct one. Maybe Carol's guilt, the residue of her Catholic upbringing, was wrong. Melody seemed perfectly happy with her attitude,' and Carol certainly wasn't happy with her own.
She stole a glance at Melody. She hadn't noticed before this afternoon that there was a savage quality to her beauty. She'd first seen it after their second round of lovemaking. She looked up to see Melody standing above her, alert as a hunting panther as she stared into the forest beyond the beach. The set of her jaw, the iciness of her slanted eyes, the litheness of her nude body-she looked like someone who wouldn't have felt at all out of place in the Stone Age. She thought that she'd heard someone in the underbrush, but she convinced herself-and Carol-that it had only been a deer.
The day had stretched long and leisurely before them this morning, and now it was all used up. They were tying up the boat. They were walking the few short blocks to the oceanfront. They were at the door. Carol felt like screaming. Time seemed to be racing, hurling her headlong into the confrontation she dreaded.
"Leave any chicken?" John asked as he lugged the cooler into the house for them.
Keyed up for melodrama and confronted with a banal remark like that, Carol found herself suddenly at ease. The world was still spinning along. No unwinking eye in the sky had witnessed the events on the island.
"Lots," Carol said. "I bought the family-sized bucket, and we weren't up to it."
"I ate a lot more than I thought I would," Melody observed blandly.
"There's some wine, too," Carol said hastily.
"And potato salad. And coleslaw," John said, unpacking. "And watermelon. You packed for an army, Carol. I guess we don't have to worry about supper. Unless you want to go out?"
The question was directed generally, but Melody answered it: "I am going out. Ken asked me to go to the new Mexican place with him."
"Ken?" John echoed-not questioning the identity, but her use of the name.
"Mr. Burke, then," Melody amended. "I thought you and Carol might like to be alone for a change, so I said okay."
Carol had expected a negative reaction to this news, but John went beyond her expectations. He looked as if he'd just been hit with an axe.
"Wait a minute," he said. "Wait a minute. This guy, he's what? Thirty? Thirty-five? You can't go out on a date with somebody like that."
"It's not a date. We were talking the other day, and it turned out we'd both been in Mexico, only I don't remember it very well, and he said why don't we go over to the new place in Lunalia and see if the food is really authentic. That's all. We're just going over there and back, just over the causeway, and I ought to be back before nine o'clock."
"Listen, baby. We don't know who this guy is. We don't know a thing about him, what he does for a living, anything."
"Well. Wouldn't this be a good chance for me to find out?" Melody asked with a grin.
Carol could see that John still opposed the idea, but that he was wavering. She didn't want the day to end in a sordid family squabble; and she wanted to give Melody some evidence that she was on her side. Trying to sound reasonable and disinterested, she said, "It seems like a harmless idea, John."
"I see I'm outnumbered," he said, with more of an edge in his voice than the occasion seemed to warrant. "Okay. But make sure you're home by nine, honey. And please don't make a habit of going out with this guy."
"I'll change," Melody said.
John poked morosely at a piece of chicken, saying nothing, when she'd left the kitchen.
"I only got a glimpse of this Mr. Burke this morning, John," Carol said, pouring them each a glass of wine, "but I'd say his specialty is wealthy divorcees. With maybe an occasional homeless beach bunny thrown in. He looks a little too shrewd to try to pull something in his own backyard."
"Listen to the woman of the world," he said, with more than a hint of a sneer in his voice.
She set her glass down firmly, about to say something she knew she would regret. Before she could say it, John sensed her mood and slipped in a quick apology: "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you. It's just that I've seen more of this guy than you have, and I thing he's developed a ... a morbid interest in my daughter. She's noticed it, too, and I don't know how he got her alone to talk to her. Her announcement just came out of left field, and that upset me more than anything."
John's little speech gave Carol time to examine her own motives while she half-listened to it. She didn't like the idea of Melody's going out with the neighbor, either, but she was afraid that her sole reason for not liking it was jealousy, pure and simple; and so, by supporting Melody, she'd been bending over backwards to deny to herself that she was jealous. John was probably right. Even if he was her father, he could still see the situation more objectively than her ... her lover. But it was too late to change sides now.
"She's a pretty grown-up girl, John. She can take care of herself," she said honestly; and then, with something less than total honesty, she shot him an up-from-under look and added: "And besides, we don't get much chance to be alone together."
He looked more uncomfortable than pleased, and she was also less than happy with her own tactics. She had put him in a position where he would be rejecting her unequivocal offer if he quibbled further with the date.
"How do I look?" Melody asked, breezing in the door, and Carol noted that John took advantage of this distraction to drain his glass and pour another.
"Like you just escaped from the county road gang," John said.
"John!" Carol cried with mock indignation.
"That's okay," Melody said, cracking a cherry cola from the cooler. "He thinks Ken is on the lam from Raiford, so we'll make a lovely couple."
Carol was surprised that Melody knew how to use cosmetics with restraint and taste. She wore just a hint of lipstick, rouge and eye makeup, just enough to complement the natural beauty of her face without overwhelming it. She wore simple gold earrings. Below the neck, though, was something else: a blue work shirt and a skintight pair of threadbare jeans with a rosebud appliqu� over her pubic area.
"You look lovely," Carol said.
"I should have showered," Melody said, leaning against the door of the refrigerator. "I still have that suntan gunk all over me."
Carol looked down hastily, not daring to see if Melody was giving her a knowing glance: because Melody had not applied any of the suntan oil to her body, not directly.
A light tap at the screen door, and then Burke's voice said: "Hello."
"Come on in," Melody said.
Before Ken had even closed the door behind him, John asked bluntly: "What's all this about a dinner date?"
Ken was dressed to match Melody: old polo shirt and faded jeans. His tan looked even darker by artificial light, making his gray eyes almost colorless. He was a very muscular man, Carol noted, and he moved like a sexy tomcat. John was probably handsomer-Carol thought he bore a marked resemblance to Gregory Peck at the same age-but no woman could be in a room with Ken Burke without sensing his very masculine vibrations. She began to see why John was concerned.
"Well, not a date, not exactly," he said, gesturing deprecatingly at his outfit. "Just turns out that Melody and I are old Mexico hands. We thought we'd see how the new place in Lunalia shapes up."
"I've yet to find any really good Mexican food east of the Pecos," John said, seeming to thaw slightly, "You can't tell till you've tried them all. Why don't you and Mrs. Owen come along with us?"
Wow, Carol thought: either his motives were as pure as the driven snow, or else he was an even slicker article than she'd suspected. She also noted his accurate memory for her name and marital status on one short introduction, She knew that short, simple names like her own were the hardest to remember; and she'd observed that people who'd been told otherwise often persisted in calling her "miss."
John was apparently disarmed by Ken's offer,, He actually smiled at the other man as he said, "No, you go on and enjoy yourselves. I've already been stuffing myself with this cotton-pickin', sticky-fingered chicken, whatever they call it-unless you want to go, Carol?"
"No, I'm bushed," she explained.
"I hope you didn't overdo it," Melody said. "I'm not easy to keep up with."
"She's some swimmer," John agreed, while Carol made an intensive study of the gray wavy lines in the red plastic table top.
But Carol had a temper that matched her red hair, and she was sick and tired of being surreptitiously bullied by Melody's disingenuous remarks. She looked up quickly from the table and eyed Melody levelly as she said: "And a remarkable diver. Sometimes she'd go down and I'd think she was never going to come up."
Melody laughed merrily.
"So that's all the more reason to be home early," John said, but he tried to soften this reversion to parental authority with an awkward smile. "By nine, right?"
Ken answered for her: "Don't worry, John. I remember how my folks used to worry about my little sister when she was this age."
Carol thought that might have been laying it on a bit thick, but at least he didn't go so far as to say that he would treat Melody like his own little sister. But John seemed to buy it; and Melody studied Ken behind her cat-mask, observing another denizen of this strange planet.
"Funny guy," John said when they'd left.
"How so?"
"I get the feeling he's as much interested in me as he is in Melody."
"A bisexual beach boy?" Carol asked, tossing the words out before she realized that such little jokes should no longer be funny to her.
John didn't note her discomfiture. "No, I mean interested ... curious ... nosy, that's what I mean."
"Maybe he's a fan. Maybe he's a reporter who's going to write you up."
"Not bloody likely," said John, who sometimes used Britticisms culled from English movies to put his reactions at one remove from reality.
"You have been written up."
"Yeah, I've even been interviewed on TV. But nobody ever snuck around in the bushes for three weeks to set me up for it."
"Then he probably is a fan. He just thinks it would be gauche, or something, to come right out and tell you how great he thinks you are."
John snorted. He poured another drink.
"I think I'll take the shower that Melody didn't. If it's all right with you."
"Of course. There's towels in the hall closet."
"Come along and keep me company," she said, rising and leaving the room without waiting to note his reaction; but she heard him follow.
Her plan was unclear. She didn't know how she would go about doing it. She wasn't, as John had ironically pointed out, a woman of the world. But it had been revealed to her-forcibly revealed, when she made that unthinking crack about bisexuals-that she had to know. Melody had aroused her as no man had ever aroused her, and she'd satisfied her as even Charlie had never satisfied her. She had to know if the experience owed its intensity to a sexuality that had matured in frustration, or if it was so intense because it was the kind of sex that she preferred.
More than that, she had to know about John. Sitting with him in the kitchen this evening, she'd felt a sort of warmth for him-but "a sort of warmth" was nothing to base a marriage on. And in that same kitchen, she'd felt a fluttering in her stomach whenever she'd looked at Melody.
Melody. Maybe that was the answer to all her questions. Lesbian was a word so general, so abstract that it meant nothing to her; and Melody meant much to her. Back in college, it had been-she hesitated a moment, surprised that she had to grope for the name-it had been Valerie who'd been important, not sex, but sex with Valerie. Just as Charlie had been the essence of it, not the sex, but that had made sex with Charlie important. And Melody seemed more important than all of them had ever been.
John was leading her through his combination bedroom and study, which adjoined the bathroom with the shower, when he said, as if cued by her thoughts: "Have fun today?"
"Yes ... yes, we had fun," she said. Realizing that she'd said it with almost reverential solemnity, she tried to lighten her tone as she added: "We got to know each other a lot better. I think I can safely say that we're friends now."
"That's great. One of the troubles with-well, it was unfortunate that she never really got along with my second wife."
Unseen by him, Carol smiled at the clumsy rewording. He'd meant to say: "One of the troubles with Leila ... "
"There you are," John said, flipping on the bathroom light and starting to withdraw after checking that all was in order. "Help yourself."
Carol didn't stand aside when he tried to leave. She was wearing a hip-length jacket over her green and black bikini, and she let that drop to the floor behind her. She kept her face expressionless and looked him in the eye, knowing her words would sound too coy or kittenish otherwise, as she said: "I can never scrub my back properly. Would you like to do it?"
He seemed startled, even stunned. She felt an acute attack of embarrassment coming on, and she knew she had to push ahead boldly. She reached back to unfasten her halter and let it drop to the floor. She kept her eyes fixed on his. She saw his eyes flicker downward, back again.
"Carol ... " He didn't seem to know what to say or do after that.
She stepped a little closer to him. She began peeling her bikini down, stopping when the first red fluff was visible. She saw his eyes flick downward again.
"I know this isn't the way ... the way things have been between us. But-but, goddamnit, John, I'm as horny as a woman can get! I want to take a shower with you. Or I'll do it on the bed if you prefer, only I'll get your sheets all greasy. Or on the floor. Or anywhere. Does that shock you? You looked shocked. Christ!"
The last word was almost a scream as she turned away from him and ran her rigid fingers through her hair. What the hell was the matter with him? Or with her? She'd never told such a pack of lies in her life: she felt about as sexy as an ice cube. But being refused like this-being merely stared at, as if she were a freak on display-that was more than she could stand.
She felt the light pressure of his hands on her waist. Her instinctive reaction was to freeze stiff as a board, but she fought it down. She leaned back against his chest.
"Of course I'm shocked, Carol," he murmured in her ear through the thickness of her sea-scented hair. "It's all I've been thinking about ... hoping for ... "
"You haven't acted that way," she said, and the words sounded harsher in her ears than she'd intended.
"I didn't want to rush you," he said mildly, "after what you told me."
She had almost worked up a case against him for being cold, unfeeling-undersexed, perhaps. And now he'd turned the tables on her, reasonably pointing out that she'd discouraged him with her talk about her own withdrawal from life since the blow of her husband's death.
His hands were moving on her oiled body now, gently tugging the bikini lower. One of his hands slid upward to cradle the fullness of her naked breast, a touch more intimate than any she'd yet permitted him. She felt panic welling up, constricting her throat: whether a return of the traumatic withdrawal she'd spoken about or a result of her current deception, she didn't know, but she tried hard to fight it down.
"You're trembling."
"I'm ... scared," she said honestly.
"Relax. Let it happen, I won't hurt you. I love you."
He was having trouble pushing the bikini down her thighs. She took charge of that operations glad to have something to do with her hands, even though her fingers seemed numb and nerveless. Maybe she was glad for the opportunity to break contact with his body for a moment. She didn't know.
She stumbled as she stepped out of the bathing suit. He steadied her. A glance told her that he'd already discarded his blue shirt and had undone the belt of his khaki shorts. She couldn't stop now, and she told herself that she didn't want to.
"Are you sure ... ?"
"Yes!" she whispered, but she didn't meet his eyes.
He turned her towards him. She fought against the urge to curl into an insensate ball. She locked her hands behind his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest. She felt the firm thickness of his cock against her belly, and she noted that it wasn't fully rigid yet; but it began to stiffen against her skin when he kissed her.
She experienced a weird feeling. A shiver ran down her spine. It was- akin to the shock of greeting an old friend in the street only to find, on drawing closer, that he was a total stranger. The feeling she experienced now was the other side of that coin. For when she kissed John, she imagined-she almost believed-that she was kissing his daughter.
The feeling was so strong, so alarming, that she broke off the kiss and stared at him.
"What's wrong?"
"I ..."
She didn't know what to say. But he didn't wait for an explanation. He bent and kissed the hollow of her throat, her neck, her shoulders.
"I'm all covered with that gunk," she protested. "Let's get in the shower."
"It smells good," he murmured, his kisses moving lower to her breasts.
She couldn't pinpoint the similarity in their kisses. It was a fleeting impression, no more accessible to analysis than a flash of deja vu. She explained it as a curious manifestation of her guilt feelings, a dirty trick played on her by her subconscious mind, and she let it go at that.
She snaked her hands between their bodies to encircle the thickness of his cock with her fingers. It became fuller, more solid under her touch. His earlier flaccidity had led her to suspect-perhaps to hope-that he might prove impotent, it would have been an easy way out of her troubles, an excuse for breaking the engagement. But breaking it for such a cause would probably have involved bitter recriminations. Then she couldn't have remained ... a friend of the family.
She almost laughed at the ironic twist she gave the trite phrase. She told herself that she was shameless, and she found herself taking a perverse pride in the fact that she was. She was not only evil, she was more evil than anyone she'd ever even heard of: seducing the daughter and the father on the same day.
She found herself beginning to enjoy what she was doing. She hugged the wicked secret in her breast, and it warmed her and relaxed her. She sought John's lips again with her mouth, actively searching for the similarity that had earlier alarmed her. She was pleased when she found it.
His prick was stiff and hard in her hand. She loved the hot, pulsing feel of it, the eager way it seeped sticky dew onto her fingers. She began slowly to sag to her knees.
"Carol ... what ... ?" he murmured, as if he felt obliged to protest what she was doing but didn't want to protest, Perhaps she was abasing herself to expiate the guilt she still felt.
Perhaps she was trying to live out the sexual fantasy she'd entertained earlier in the day, when the rapist had forced her to kneel and blow him. She didn't know. She only knew that she had a sudden, urgent desire to kneel in front of John and suck his cock.
Carol had once been startled when, during a discussion of sex, a close friend had told her that she thought cocks were ugly. The Mend bad objection to their function; she just didn't like the way they looked.
Carol simply couldn't fathom that attitude. She thought that an erect phallus was a beautiful thing. It protruded so proudly, so aggressively; it was unquestionably there. Given her esthetic viewpoint, it was perhaps a wonder that she hadn't become promiscuous, but she hadn't. Except for three or four earlier affairs that meant nothing, all her appreciation of cocks had been lavished on Charlie's.
Now, her eyes on a level with John's outthrust prick, she remembered how beautiful they were. She began to take some encouragement from this: no unredeemable lesbian would have felt this way. John's cock was especially big, she thought, and it stuck up at a jaunty angle from the black forest of her pubic hair. She reached out to stroke the dangling, hairy sac of his balls with her fingertips, and he swayed closer.
She knelt up more erectly, until her mouth was right over the tip of the rigid prong. She held it lightly in her fingertips. Opening her mouth, she slowly and lasciviously traced her lips with the spongy head, as if she were using a tube of lipstick, leaving a gleaming smear of anticipatory fluid on her lips. Then she cradled it against her cheek, murmuring wordlessly, as she made a slow circle of its thick root with her tongue.
"Carol ... I want to do something for you, too," John said hesitantly. "Let's go in the bed, and-"
"I want to suck you off. Don't you want me to?"
Her delight in her own wickedness had returned. She seldom used such blunt language, and it gave her a little thrill to know that her uncharacteristic behavior was keeping John off balance. The simple act of saying such words added to her thrill.
"I won't argue with you," John said, stroking her hair, subtly trying to nudge her mouth toward the tip of his cock.
"You have such a big, beautiful cock, John. I just love the way it smells and tastes and ... mmmm ... "
She teased him by slipping her compressed lip rapidly over the head of his prick and sliding them down further and further, until fully half its length was submerged in the wet heat of her lustful suction. She heard him gasp with pleasure. Just as quickly, she pulled it out of her mouth. It was red and wet with her saliva, and the head was almost purple from its tightly stretched expansion. It quivered as tightly as a steel spring when she touched it.
"Please," John breathed, "put it in your mouth again ... suck on it."
Carol smiled as she licked his cock all ever with her busy tongue. She pulled his foreskin back and forth steadily with her fingertips while she licked. His cock felt as hot as a furnace, and it was giving off an overpowering aroma of male.-musk. She felt an itchy tingle between her leg. It surprised her, because it was the first physical symptom she'd felt of sexual arousal for John today. It pleased her, too, to know that a man could still arouse her.
She began to wonder if it wouldn't be better to let him fuck her. But at just that moment John let out a strangled groan: "For Christ's sake-I'm coming! Put it in your mouth!"
She moved a little too slowly, and his first sizzling jet of come splashed against her nose. She giggled. She began jerking him off furiously, reveling in the novel sensation of feeling his gism spouting against her nose and her eyelids and her mouth. She licked her lips greedily as it ran down her face.
His fingers clutched her shoulders convulsively, almost hurtfully. She sensed that she might have carried her teasing game a little too far. While his cock was still spurting, splashing its ropy wads of cream against her face, she thrust her lips down on it and sucked greedily.
John sighed with relief, as if her mouth had quenched a fire in his emitting prick. He swayed back and forth, fucking her in the mouth, while she pumped with her lips and washed him all over with her tongue.
At last he drew her to her feet and looked into her eyes with pleasure and bewilderment.
"You're nuts," he said.
"Now," she said, pausing to dab some come from her cheek and lick it off her fingertips, "I really do need a shower. Are you still game?"
"When I want to quit, I'll tell you."
Chapter Seven
Melody didn't know any Spanish, but Ken Burke's variety was impressively fast. He even indulged in some colloquial banter with the waiter, over and above the business of the menu, and was rewarded with a couple of laughs that seemed genuine. She got the impression that he was showing off for her benefit.
Melody decided not to beat around the bush. As soon as the waiter had gone, leaving a cold beer for Ken and a Cook for herself, she said: "John suspects that you're a notorious Indiana bank robber, in hiding."
"Well, he's only off by four or five hundred miles," Ken laughed. "I come from Kansas, originally."
"That doesn't answer the bank robber part," said Melody, who was certain that he wasn't; but would rather have liked it if he was.
"He wouldn't be much of a novelist if he didn't have a vivid imagination," Ken parried.
It interested her that he knew what John did; she supposed some local gossip had told him, perhaps the agent who had rented him his house. But it didn't answer her question, so she said: "And what do you do?"
"I loaf and invite my soul. No-don't get mad," he said hastily, even though she wasn't. "I'm a construction engineer. I've been working on a highway In Brazil for the past three years, and-well, I just don't feel like working for a while, that's all."
The gazpacho arrived. Ken made a production out of tasting it and commenting on it, perhaps to distract her from further questions, but Melody was not easily distracted. When he ran out of things to say about what was to her just a bowl of cold tomato soup, she said:
"It still seems odd that a young, good-looking man with probably a lot of money to spend would hole up in a godforsaken place like this. I mean, if you're really nuts for Florida, why not go to Miami, or Fort Lauderdale, and pick up girls, and all that?"
"Well, thanks for the young and good-looking. That'll give me some comfort tonight when I take my daily ration of Geritol."
"Be serious."
He threw up his hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay. If I was looking for wild nightlife, I'd go back to some of those construction camps in the jungle. I was tired. Worn out. I felt like being alone for a while, getting in some fishing and swimming, and this looked like a good place to do it. Satisfied?"
"You make me sound like a district attorney," Melody protested mildly. "I was just trying to put you at ease by getting you to talk about yourself. That's what it says you should do in all the teenage advice columns I read."
Ken smiled wryly. "I'll bet you read more substantial things than that. How come you call your father 'John'?"
"What?"
"I was just trying to put you at ease," he chuckled. "You know, I haven't told him, but I'm his biggest fan. I've read everything he's written. I particularly-"
"Not everything," she interrupted.
"Hm? I thought I kept pretty good track of them. He's written a dozen books, hasn't he?"
"Plus fifty that you never heard about. He used to write pornographic novels under pen names like Dick Strong and Rod Harder until he started selling stuff under his own name. I Was Daddy's Darling, by Katya Roksoff-I bet you never heard of that one, huh?"
He shook his head, smiling uncertainly. "I'll be darned," he said. The revelation seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he said, "How do you like the food?"
"It's hot," she said. She'd just begun to eat a tamale, and it was making her eyes water.
"It's supposed to be. This is really not such a bad place. Your mother died in Mexico, didn't she?"
"How did you know that?"
"I'm sorry. The thought just popped into my head. I shouldn't have blurted it out like that."
"It doesn't bother me. I was just a kid then, nine or ten. But what I want to know is, how did you find out about it?"
"Some article I read about your father. How did you happen to be there?"
"Well, backpacking was just starting to get popular. John thought it would be a good gimmick for selling a travel article, backpacking with the whole family through the Yucatan Peninsula, looking at the old ruins and all like that. He even had a contract, I think, from some magazine. But it turned out to be more than we could handle. And then Mama caught the jungle rot, and that was the end of it."
He looked sincerely troubled when he said, "You talk about it in a very offhand way."
Melody had learned that she could fluster Ken by smiling, so she smiled. "I'm sorry if I sound hard-hearted, Ken, but it was a long time ago. I hardly remember her. And the things that I do remember aren't very nice."
"I didn't mean to criticize. It's none of my business," he murmured, looking flustered.
"I ought to make you understand, though. One of my earliest memories of Mama-there was some kind of commotion downstairs. It was late at night. I went out to the front door and she was out there in her nightgown, cleaning off the steps with a toothbrush, and Daddy-I used to call him Daddy when I was little-was trying to get her back into the house."
"I-" Ken began, even more flustered.
"No, let me explain," Melody said, neatly putting down her fork. "I didn't understand it, of course, so from the beginning it just scared me, scared the hell out of me, and alienated her from me, so that I just couldn't relate to her as a mother. Even when she was well-which was most of the time, really, but I could never know when she'd start acting strangely again. Like the time I found out she'd burned all my dolls in the fireplace. I must have been six then, or seven. Later the spells got worse, and more frequent, and she would disappear for days, and sometimes John would have to go and pick her up in some awful place, some cheap motel where he'd been having a fistfight with somebody she picked up in a bar."
"Please," he said, now more pained than simply flustered.
"But then, before we went to Yucatan, she'd had one of her good spells for a long time. I don't remember this myself, not entirely, just pieces of it, but John's talked about it when I've asked him to. Anyway, the hike was supposed to be like the beginning of a new life. Back to nature. Fresh air. All that. Those were things that Mama liked when she was well. Knit the family closer together. I don't know, I'm babbling, aren't I? Well. It didn't work that way. She started going off the deep end again, out in the middle of nowhere. We had already started for the nearest town, which was about twenty miles away, when she came down with a fever. She couldn't walk, and John couldn't carry her, and by the time he got help back there, she was dead. So I'm sorry if I don't sound all broken up about it."
"I'm sorry, Melody. I really am."
She wondered what he was sorry for: having brought up the subject, or for the death of her mother. She decided not to ask. She believed she'd ended on just the proper note, leaving him in just the right state of confusion and embarrassment. She returned to her tamales, confident that her face was giving nothing away.
She'd told him just how it had happened, but she hadn't told him all of it. They'd set out for help early in the morning, she and John, but they'd progressed at a leisurely pace. Toward noon they'd stopped. To gather flowers. It had been a strange afternoon, wandering in the jungle, picking flowers. John had seemed in a sad mood. She'd known what was going on, but she hadn't questioned it, not then and not since. It had been the thing to do.
They camped out that night, got a late start the next morning, and didn't reach the smelly village with its roofs of galvanized iron until evening. It wasn't until the next afternoon that John and the stretcher-bearers got back to the place where they'd left her and by that time, of course, she was dead.
"He married again, didn't he?"
Melody glanced at him sharply. She thought she'd succeeded admirably in getting him off the subject of her father, but he was apparently not to be deterred.
"Yes. To a woman named Leila Byrnes. We never got along very well."
"Well, I can see I've offended you with my curiosity. All I can say is that I've fallen out of the habit of making small talk with beautiful young American ladies."
She wasn't offended. But she knew that almost everybody misread her face, seeing coldness or hostility when her feelings were merely neutral. What he had done was to further pique her curiosity about his motives.
"I spoke shortly about Leila because I don't have much to say about her."
"I'm interested in her," he said, smiling, "because I'm interested in your father. You don't know what it's like, spending three years in a stinking jungle, speaking and thinking in Portuguese, and then finding a book in your own language that sort of seizes you and takes you right out of your day-to-day concerns. Your father's books were like that. So I read all the articles about him that I could get. And then, by chance, I found myself living next door to him. So, I thought I might get to know him, satisfy some of my curiosity. Well-it all sounds sort of dumb, doesn't it, when I lay it all out like that?"
"Sort of," Melody agreed maliciously. "If you could hear him bitching and moaning about his work, and sneering at the people that he imagines read his stuff, then you might feel differently. It might do him good to talk to you. He pictures his typical reader as a forty-year-old ribbon clerk in Des Moines who has sweaty palms and bad breath and would like to lead a life of romantic adventure, only he has a wife and three kids who won't let him. And now here's you, with a mahogany tan and steely eyes, just back from building bridges with your bare hands in the Amazon jungle, and you get off on his books."
Ken laughed hard, so hard that he drew the eyes of everyone in the place.
"You're wonderful," he said. "I think you've inherited some of your father's way with words."
Ken had paid the check, and now he led her from the restaurant, taking her arm lightly. She'd noted with approval that he'd had only one bottle of beer with his meal. John had a tendency to get sloshed in restaurants. There was a lot about Ken that she approved of. She liked his looks. She liked his attentive manner. She liked the certainty with which he moved, the way he filled up the space he occupied.
The one thing she didn't like was the way he'd turned the tables on her, asking all the questions when she'd hoped to do just that. Perhaps she could still remedy this.
He held open the passenger's door of his nondescript rental sedan. "We have time yet before you turn into a pumpkin," he said. "Would you like to go for a drive?"
"Of course," she said brightly, and that seemed to fluster him again.
While he strolled to the driver's side, she undid three buttons of her blue chambray shirt. She hadn't made up her mind yet whether she would entice him into fucking her, but she was inclined to think that she would.
She found him attractive, but that was only part of it. She'd met other attractive men, and yet she'd never been unfaithful to John. But she was very angry with John this evening: for his possessive attitude toward her while he was at the same time fawning over Carol. And Carol had made it clear, by urging John to let her go with Ken, that she couldn't get rid of her fast enough. She knew what she and John were doing now, back home.
But Ken's attractiveness and her anger with John and Carol didn't account entirely for the sexual itch she felt. Much of it was due to the fooling around-that's how she thought of it- that she'd done with Carol today. It had been an amusing diversion, amusing mostly for the impact it had had on Carol, but it hadn't been satisfying. It had been like trying to fill herself on dainty hors d'oeuvres. She still hungered for the main course. John, of course, would be exhausted by the time she got home.
They had been driving for a while on the landward side of the bay. Maybe Ken didn't know it, but the street they were now traveling had been dead-ended by the construction of the causeway. Boatyards lined the street to the right, a few fishermen's bars and bait and tackle shops stood in the marshland to the left. Maybe he did know it. She didn't tell him.
"Are you still angry?"
She laughed. "I never was."
"You seem thoughtful."
"You reminded me of things to think about. I hadn't thought about them for a long time."
"You've used that phrase before, 'a long time,' 'a long time ago.' Jesus. A long time, to me, is twenty years, but that's longer than you've lived. Has your life been that dull?"
"Not at all. But it's about to get exciting, when you drive into the bay."
"Huh?"
"Look where you're going."
"Oh. Yeah. I guess this really shows me up for a tourist, doesn't it," Ken said, braking at the barrier across the road. Instead of turning, he cut the engine and the lights.
"Or something."
"I'll take you home now, if you want."
"I didn't say that. Give me a cigarette."
She expected him to reach for her, but he didn't. He stayed scrupulously to his side of the seat as he offered her a cigarette and lit it. She moved closer to him.
"It's the generation gap," she said. "That "long time' business."
"Funny, I don't notice that with you. Any gap. You seem awfully grown up. I find myself forgetting how old you are, just not noticing it."
"That could get you in trouble" she said, stretching her arms back, letting her unbuttoned blouse gape a little.
He cleared his throat. He shot her a glance that seemed nervous. Maybe he'd been in the jungle too long. Maybe he'd acquired a taste for heavy equipment operators. She wondered.
He surprised her by saying: "You were telling me about Leila."
"No, I wasn't, but what the hell. She was from Kansas, too. You did say you were from Kansas? She was outgoing and effervescent. And I'm not. So we didn't get along-no, I won't say that. We just didn't become very close, that's all."
"She died of some strange fever too, didn't she?"
"There was nothing strange about it. Twenty other people died of it at around the same time. It's called viral encephalitis. Mosquitoes carry it. Mostly it kills horses, but some strains of it kill human beings, too."
"You seem to know a lot about it."
"There was a lot about it in the papers. And I was kind of interested, because it did kill my stepmother, after all."
"I've read about it, too. Mostly it kills children, or very old people who can't resist it."
"But not all the time. Obviously. This subject is kind of depressing. Do you mind?"
She inched a little closer. Still he made no move to touch her.
He asked: "Do you love your father?"
What the hell! It was with some difficulty that she maintained her composure and said, in a neutral voice, "He's a father."
Now, at last, he slipped his arm around her shoulders and clasped her right arm. He stated: "He beats you, doesn't he."
So that was it. She looked away from him, out the window. A big cruiser was churning close by, blotting out the far-off lights of Lunalia Beach as it passed close inshore. She saw it before she heard the throb of its engines coming across the still water.
"I hear you sometimes," he said. "It seems ... well, it's none of my business-"
"Oh, Ken," she sobbed, turning and burying her face in his shoulder.
"Hey. Hey. Hey, now. It's okay," he said, patting her shoulder while she squirmed closer, gluing herself to his body.
"Ken."
The awkward patting motion became a rubbing, a stroking that progressed down her spine. She made herself shiver at infrequent intervals, and he drew her closer, as if for warmth.
"It's all right, baby. It's okay."
As if by accident, she let her hand brush his crotch. His cock was as stiff as a board. She smiled into the secret darkness of his shoulder and let out another shuddering sob.
She lifted her face to his. As she expected he would, he kissed her; but unexpectedly, he did it almost savagely, violently. He held her so hard that her ribs began to hurt, but she did nothing to discourage him. Her lips parted after a moment, as if reluctantly, and she managed to shrug her shirt wider open until she knew that one of her breasts was bare. His stroking hand soon encountered it and captured it.
No longer pretending that her touch was accidental, Melody slid her hand to his prick and began stroking it through the tightly stretched material of his jeans. It wasn't long before the cloth over the bulging head grew wet.
He broke off the kiss and stared at her. He seemed alarmed.
"We can't ... " His voice trailed off as he took his hand from her breast and made a clumsy effort to rearrange her blouse.
Melody thwarted his efforts by undoing the final buttons and shrugging out of the blouse entirely. "Of course we can," she said. "Don't you like me?"
"Like you? Jesus, I want you so bad it hurts. I haven't been able to sleep at night since the first time I saw you. I ... you've been driving me nuts."
"Then don't be silly," she said, snuggling against him again and trying to renew their kiss.
He avoided kissing her, but he seemed not to notice that she was deftly unbuckling his belt.
"Wait a minute. Wait. It's wrong. You're just a kid, I'm old enough to be your father. And it's unfair to you. Just because your father beats you and keeps you on a tight leash, you shouldn't give yourself to the first guy that comes along. I like you-I don't want to take advantage of your rotten home life."
He seemed to notice for the first time that she was trying to take his pants off. He made an effort to keep her from pulling down his zipper, but she was determined, and he was reluctant to use sufficient force.
"You're not taking advantage of me. I want you because I want you," she said, and this time he didn't try hard enough to avoid meeting her eager lips.
She slid her hand between Ken's hard belly and the elastic of his undershorts. The shorts were slimy with the ooze from his cock. Soon her hand was encircling the hard, swollen circumference of his hot tool. The promptness and intensity of his arousal aroused her, too; it was far more pleasing to her than any of his awkward verbal compliments had been.
Having paid his respects to conventional morality, Ken was now willing to assist nature in taking its course. He undid her jeans and peeled them down over her hips with her underpants. She shrugged and wiggled to assist him while she continued to work on his clothing.
When she was fully naked, sprawled half in his lap, he thought to make a nervous survey of their surroundings. There was some activity at a bar a few hundred yards back down the road, but immediately around them was only darkness and the night sounds of the marsh, the hum and whir of traffic on the causeway almost above them.
He laughed at his own nervousness. "I Haven't made out in a car since-since I was eighteen, I guess."
"I never did. Do we have to get in the back seat?"
He gave her a cautious look. "You have ... done it ... "before, haven't you?"
"That's a hell of a question to ask a beautiful young lady like you said I was. Anyway, what's the difference?"
"I don't want to-I mean, I don't want you to do anything, you know, drastic, because this ... " we ... that is, ... "
"Try it in Portuguese," she said, giving his cock a sudden, brisk rub. "You're saying that this isn't very important between us, ships that pass and all that stuff, and I shouldn't let you bust my cherry on such short acquaintance. Is that what's bothering you?"
He looked acutely uncomfortable and made some tentative attempts at speech.
"Don't let it bother you," she concluded, taking his hand and directing it down between her thighs.
He kissed her again. His fingertips stroked her pussy lightly, maddeningly. She pressed his hand down much more firmly, encouraging him to rub her clitoris hard. Irregular spasms began to contract the muscles of her belly. She kissed him so hard that their teeth clicked together almost painfully. She could feel her hot juices percolating out around his fingers as he probed and caressed and fondled her bare cunt.
"No, we don't have to go in the back," he muttered.
He slid from under the steering wheel and took her in his lap as he moved to the passenger's side. He guided her to straddle his thighs with her knees as she faced him. She reached down to take his prick in her hand and direct it upward as she sank down on it. She felt it pushing the petals of her cunt apart, then slipping it easily. She wiggled all the way down, sighing.
"Figuring out things like this, I guess that's one of the advantages of being an engineer, huh?"
He laughed as he shifted around to make sure every last inch of his cock was inside her. "I'll have to show you how to do it in a Volkswagen sometime," he murmured, his lips brushing her throat as he kissed his way down to her breasts.
"Show me how to do it here," she sighed, beginning to grind her hips in a slow orbit around the hard, upright axis of his prick. She groaned as she felt it slipping and tickling and rubbing inside her pulsing vagina.
He was scratching all the itches that had been inaccessible to Carol's tongue and fingers, the hungers that the older woman had merely intensified. When his lips touched her nipples, she felt a shock-wave of pleasure that seemed to vibrate straight down to her tingling cunt.
He eased up and down against the seat of the car, his movements somewhat cramped by his position but nonetheless delightful to her. He twisted from side to side, adding a corkscrewing motion to the straight up and down movements of his bulging cock. His hands gripped her ass, raising and lowering her on he hot, slippery pillar of flesh that filled her up.
Melody had noticed that his prick wasn't as big as John's, but that happily proved to be no impediment to her enjoyment. Once it was inside her, it seemed entirely big enough for the job it was doing. Her position, too, allowed her to take it in just as deep as she possibly could. Having read John's dirty books, she'd always imagined that an oversized cock was the principal requirement for a girl's satisfaction, and she was delighted to find that this wasn't true.
She lavished every bit of her precocious skill on Ken's prick, clutching it and rubbing in the slithery confines of her agile cunt. John had often told her that she had an almost superhuman talent for fucking, that she had muscles in her cunt that other girls just hadn't heard about, and she was determined to give Ken the full benefit of her ability. She could tell by the tightening clutch of his fingers, by his sharp gasps of pleasure and surprise, by his efforts to drive his cock ever deeper into her clasping quim, that she was succeeding.
Even though she was able to calculate the effect of what she was doing to him, her calculation was far from cold ... She had set out to entice him deliberately, almost dispassionately, but now every tingling nerve and straining sinew of her body was involved in this hot, slathering fuck. She knew that she was going to come if only he could hold out a little longer, and it exhilarated her to know that even a man she didn't particularly care about could take her to such breathtaking heights of pleasure.
She pushed and pulled and humped ever more vigorously, and he matched her desires with his ever-harder thrusts and twists. The springs of the seat creaked, mingling with their gasps and the squishing sounds of their fucking to create what seemed like an overpowering din in the close confines of the car.
He increased the tempo, surging ahead of her, vibrating his stiff prick wildly inside the scalding, syrupy bath of her quim. She felt herself dissolving, becoming a part of the wave that was sweeping her away, riding to its crest and exploding in a surge of dazzling foam. Only by a supreme effort of will did she hold back the screams that threatened to rip themselves out of her throat, the howls of passion that would have told Ken exactly what he'd been overhearing when he'd thought that John was beating her. But she couldn't restrain the whimpers and moans and deep-throated groans that bubbled up from the depths of her being as she felt his hot seed spurting and spattering inside her and felt the pulsing of her vagina like a gigantic heart.
Once it was over, Ken began to worry again about discovery. He put his clothes on hastily, urged her to do the same, but she took her time about it.
He seemed not only worried but embarrassed, and at last he said with a wry smile: "I feel kind of foolish. Worrying about your virginity."
"So now that you know I'm a wicked woman, are you going to make me walk home?"
His look was pained, almost anguished. "I didn't mean that! My God, Melody, I only meant to say that I've never had a girl like you before-you were just wonderful-and I feel-well, inadequate, I guess."
"You did just fine," she said, leaning over to kiss the angle of his jaw, "I wasn't faking, you know."
Now that they were dressed, he made no move to start up the car. She could sense that there was something he wanted to tell her, but that he had strong reservations about doing so. She decided not to say anything, but she held his hand, a deliberately planned gesture of intimacy. That seemed to tip the balance. He squeezed her hand and said: "Melody ... "
"What's wrong, Ken?"
"I don't know where to start, but I guess I've got to start somewhere. I'm not exactly what I seem to be."
He paused, as if expecting some kind of prompting. She squeezed his hand again, and that seemed to satisfy him.
"The thing is, when I set out to do this, I never expected to meet somebody like you, somebody that I'd ... get involved with. It's been eating me up for two years, this thing I set out to do, and now it's all confused. On account of you. I just don't know what to do anymore, but I guess the first thing I have to do is to level with you."
He studied her face for a moment. She returned his gaze. He apparently found whatever he was looking for in her eyes, and then he announced, "My name isn't Burke, Melody, it's Byrnes. Leila Byrnes was my sister."
She had seen that one coming a mile away, but she widened her eyes slightly and stared at him with what she hoped would look like amazement.
"But why? Why didn't you just introduce yourself?" she asked.
"This is hard for me to say to you, Melody. I never would have told you at all if I hadn't found out how your father treats you. I think it's wonderful that you can still be so ... so loyal to him, despite that. But what I have to say now, this is just between you and me. Understood?"
"All right, Ken, I won't tell John, if that's what you mean, but-"
"I'm certain that he murdered my sister," he interrupted.
"Ken! That's just not true."
"I know it's an awful accusation to make, honey. I'm not making it lightly. My sister was twenty-four when she died. She'd always been healthy, active, vital-effervescent and outgoing, those were the words you used. And yet she succumbed to a disease that generally claimed only infants and old people, or those who already had some chronic illness. In record time, too, something like six hours. The symptoms were more consistent with strychnine poisoning than they were with encephalitis."
"But the coroner-"
"That's just the point I was going to make. The coroner was an undertaker by trade-an elected official with no medical training whatsoever. I got the tip-off from one of your father's own books, where a character murders his wife because he knows he can get away with it under that kind of elected coroner system. No autopsy was performed in the book, either, and the victim was cremated-just as in real life. Putting it in a book like that, it's an extreme example of the kind of vanity that all murderers have."
"But-why? They got along fine, Ken. It wasn't as if she was rich or anything ..."
"She had a five thousand dollar insurance policy, and from what I've found out about your father's circumstances at that time, it was enough to commit murder for. But there you're presupposing a rational motive, and maybe there just wasn't any. Why did Bluebeard kill his wives?"
"Wives?"
Ken sighed. He stared out through the windshield for a long moment. Then he turned back to her and said: "You told me you don't remember that trip to Yucatan very well, Melody. Could it be possible that what killed your mother wasn't a fever at all? Isn't it possible that your father didn't go for help as quickly as he might have, or that he went for it by a roundabout way? And there again, there was no autopsy."
"I remember that much about it, Ken. We went for help as quickly and directly as possible. And my mother did have a fever, I know that."
"I don't want to contradict you, Melody, but maybe a nine-year-old isn't the best kind of witness on those points. And from what you told me this evening, your father had even more of a motive than money-and in your mother's case, there was some money involved, too."
"But even if any of this is true, Ken-and honestly, I just don't believe it-what do you hope to accomplish by coming on like an undercover agent?"
"I don't know, baby, I really don't know," Ken said, shaking his head slowly. "Maybe I knew when I came here. I had the sort of idea you mentioned, being an undercover agent, a detective, but I've found out that it just isn't my line of work. I hoped to catch him off guard, to uncover some kind of evidence. Mainly I just wanted to see him and find out what kind of a man he really is. I think I've found that out. I found it out when I first heard those screams coming out of your house."
"You aren't going to ... to ... "
"Kill him? I thought about that a lot, down in Brazil. I thought about it a lot more when I came back here and started to piece the story together. I bought a gun. I've still got it-but ... No, Melody, to answer your question honestly, I can't kill him. I don't even feel anger anymore, for the past few months I've just felt a sort of dull sickness inside. Until tonight. Until I found you."
They stared into each other's eyes for a long time, and then Melody permitted him to kiss her.
Chapter Eight
"Sorry I'm late, John. Ken was telling me about his adventures in Brazil."
"It's only nine-thirty," John said with surprising equanimity. "For you, that's right on the dot."
Melody noted that Carol, freshly showered, was tented inside John's plaid bathrobe. The green tartan made her hair seem more fiery than usual, and she looked surprisingly young and innocent-even to Melody-with her face freshly scrubbed. She and John sat on opposite sides of the living room, but they looked like a pair of cats that had shared a canary recently.
"How was the food?" Carol asked.
The question seemed directed at Ken, and he answered: "Not bad. Pretty authentic."
"If they wanted to make it really authentic, they could put cockroaches in the tamales," John laughed. "I'll never forget the time I bit into-"
"Please. John," Melody gagged, holding her stomach.
"All right, all right. Would you like a drink, Ken?"
"Fine. Beer, if you've got it,"
Carol made a move to get up and play the hostess, but Melody was already on her way to the kitchen. She returned shortly with a beer for Ken and a cherry cola left over from the picnic for herself. She saw that John and Carol were polishing off the bottle of Chablis that Carol had brought for the picnic.
"It turns out that Ken is one of your fans," Melody said, and she noticed that Carol shot John a knowing look. She perched casually on the arm of the chair that Ken had taken.
"He doesn't look like one," John laughed. Then he added: "Maybe I ought to explain-"
"Melody told me what you think of your fans," Ken interrupted. "But by downgrading them, you're underestimating yourself."
"That's what I keep telling him," Carol said.
Ken continued: "I thought that Where the Bones Are Buried was a damned clever mystery."
Melody shifted her eyes toward Ken. That was the book he'd discussed with her, the one that had strengthened his belief that Leila had been murdered.
Her attention turned back to John, and she listened with something akin to horror as he said: "It's funny you should mention that. It was sort of autobiographical."
"You don't say," Ken said mildly.
"Well, maybe 'autobiographical' is too strong a word, but I got the idea from something that happened to me. You see, when my second wife died, the authorities made no real effort to determine her cause of death. Her symptoms resembled those of a disease that had killed some other people in the area, and so they assumed that she'd had it, too. I got to thinking about how a murderer might take advantage of a situation like that."
Melody was immensely relieved. John hadn't realized that he was walking in a minefield, but she didn't believe he could have said anything better calculated to disarm Ken's suspicions if he'd known about them.
"I think I'd feel a little ... ghoulish, using my painful experiences like that," Carol said.
"Artists are an unscrupulous lot," John said. "Thomas Wolfe wrote about an actor -who heard that his mother had died. For a moment he felt a genuine pang of grief. So he ran to a mirror to see what genuine grief looked like. Sometimes, it's not such a good idea, using your experiences like that. For instance, the book I'm supposed to be working on now. I incorporated some of Leila's-that was my second wife, Ken-some of Leila's characteristics, idiosyncrasies, whatever, in one of the characters. And now, I sometimes find myself reminiscing about Leila when I ought to be writing the book."
Melody could have cheered. She knew by now that John was half drunk. That was why he was being so expansive and genial. He certainly wasn't making any points with Carol, to judge by her frozen expression, in waxing slightly maudlin about Leila. But he was doing a beautiful number on Ken.
Ken rose so abruptly that he nearly spilled Melody off the arm of his chair. His face was ashen, and the smile he gave John was truly horrible, a grin from the rack.
"I ... I have to go now," he said, and without any further ceremony, he went. Melody stared after him with amusement.
"My God," Carol said into the bewildered silence, "do all your fans act like that?"
"Maybe it was the Mexican food," John chuckled. "Damned if I can figure it out. What's the matter with him, Melody?"
She fell back into the chair he'd vacated, letting her legs hang over the arm. She shrugged and sipped her cherry cola.
"I'm sorry to pull a Ken Burke," Carol said, "but I've had a busy day. I think I'll turn in now."
It developed that Carol was spending the night, sleeping in John's room while John, supposedly, would be sleeping on the couch. While he was settling Carol in bed, Melody went to the bookshelf and pulled down a copy of Where the Bones Are Buried, by John Creighton. The lurid cover of the paperback depicted a blonde woman fleeing in terror from a shadowy figure who had apparently just stopped in the act of digging with a spade to notice her. She was leafing aimlessly through it when John came back to the room.
He examined the empty wine bottle and mixed himself a gin and tonic. "You suppose he'd like me to autograph him a copy?" he asked, noticing the book.
"I'm sure he'd love that."
He looked at her uncertainly. She sat up and took off her shirt: partly because the night was hot, partly to disconcert him further. He came forward, stirring his drink, and sat cross legged on the floor near her chair.
"The jig is up, John. All is known," she said in a portentous voice.
"What are you talking about?"
"That was Leila's brother who just ran out of here. Ken Burke, Ken Bymes? Fiendishly clever, isn't he?"
"Jesus ... Christ!"
"Don't spill your drink."
"This is not some kind of joke?"
Melody lowered her voice to a murmur as she said: "Nope. He thinks you poisoned his sister. With, strychnine. He got the idea out of your book-" she tossed it toward him-"and he's come here incognito to get the goods on you. He really must be a fan of yours, because that sounds like the kind of plot you'd think up for a book."
John's brown eyes sometimes reminded her of those of a sad hound dog. They did now. "He isn't far from the truth, is he," he stated.
"He also thinks you murdered my mother by not going for help fast enough, if not also by poisoning. It's a good thing he didn't confide in Carol. How do you plan to do her in?"
"Let's not make jokes, shall we?" He looked at her hard for a moment and his voice cracked slightly when he said: "You did poison Leila, didn't you?"
"You did murder my mother, didn't you?"
"I ... All right."
He got up, made a slow circuit of the room, came back to sit where he'd been sitting before. He sipped his drink.
"What the hell are we going to do?" he whispered.
"Nothing. He's already talked himself out of knocking you off, and I think you just about demolished his theory tonight, by pure accident. A murderer wouldn't sit there jabbering about what a great idea for a book it gave him, or how much he missed the victim. Even if he still believes it, he has nothing to take to the police. About the worst he could do would be to tell Carol and maybe screw up your romance, but I don't think she'd believe him. The only thing he's still got against you is the fact that you beat me so much."
"You aren't ... you wouldn't ... I mean, Carol ... "
"I like Carol."
He stared at her in disbelief.
"No, I'm serious. I like her a lot. So stop looking at me as if I was Jack the Ripper. You knew it all along. If I hadn't done something about Leila, I'd be in Kansas and you'd probably be in the bughouse."
He sighed. "You're right, of course. I should have done it myself."
"Except that you had a thing for Leila, apparently, and I didn't. How is Carol?"
"What?"
"Is she better than I am?"
He averted his eyes in embarrassment for a moment, and then said, "No, she isn't."
She gazed at him coolly for a long moment, and then said: "Ken isn't as good as you are, either,"
He made a horrible sound in his throat, something between a sob and a stillborn scream, as he rose to his feet. He stared at her wildly as she raised her finger to her lips. Then he choked: "I'll kill the son of a bitch with my bare hands!"
"And hell kill you with the pistol he bought for the purpose. Cool off. How do you suppose I got him to bare his soul?"
John turned away from her. He raised his glass with a jerky motion, about to hurl it through the window, but he checked himself.
"Oh, shit," she said.
"What's the matter?" he asked dully.
"The only night I'm really dying for a shower, and you have to stick your ladylove in the bedroom. I think I'll go for a swim."
"Not at night. Sharks."
"Shit."
"Go ahead and take a shower. She's probably still awake."
"Reliving the events of this magical day."
"Don't-" He cut off his angry words, then said evenly, "I guess I owed you one, didn't I."
"You owe me more than one," she said, rising and embracing him from the back. "Unfortunately, nobody else appeals to me very much. Not even the Junior G-man next door. Not even Carol."
"Huh?"
She pressed closer, molding her bare breasts to his back. "You should have seen us this afternoon. You didn't know your fianc�e was a frustrated dyke, did you?"
Carol hung suspended between sleep and wakefulness, and bright visions flashed on the insides of her eyelids. She saw the white beach so clearly she could discern the individual grains of sand. The pictures changed rapidly, like cards in a rapidly shuffled deck. Sometimes she saw faces, people she knew, people she'd never seen before. Often Melody's face turned up in the riffled deck, different angles, different expressions, most often expressionless and catlike. John's face, too, leaning inward to kiss her.
Sometimes, drifting buoyantly upward, she heard the murmur of voices in the next room. Could they be fighting? No, that seemed unlikely, and the voices resumed their murmurous drowsy drone.
She was loved by two wonderful people, an embarrassment of riches. How could she juggle her affairs, keep them each from knowing about the other? She couldn't give them up, not either one of them. John had proven tonight that he could satisfy her as completely as Melody could, if not even more completely, but not even his lovemaking could make her forget the golden afternoon, the golden girl with her crown of braids and her taut, silky skin.
She slid her hand down her bare body to finger her cunt. She forked two fingers over her clitoris and began slowly and leisurely rubbing. Her fingertips nudged against the inner petals of her vagina, squeezing it open with each downward stroke. She thought of Melody and thought of John and wondered if anyone in the history of the world had ever been as wicked as she was.
She heard a soft tapping at the door. She smiled a slow, lazy smile and squirmed to a more comfortable position, still not ceasing to rub her cunt.
"Come in," she called softly.
The door opened and closed.
"John?"
"It's me."
"Melody! I was just wishing-"
"I only want to take a shower. That won't disturb you, will it?"
"No. No, of course it won't."
Melody slipped into the bathroom and snapped on the light, smiling. She was amused by the note of disappointment that Carol hadn't been able to keep from her voice. Maybe she could go to Carol's bed after taking her shower and ease some of her disappointment.
She undid her braids while the blast of the hot shower filled the room with billows of steam. The thought of Carol lying frustrated and alone in the next room was surprisingly tempting, but she forced herself not to think about it. She had more important concerns.
Despite what she'd said to calm John's fears, she was worried about Ken Burke, as she persisted in thinking of him. She wasn't worried about his suspicions: a doddering old country doctor had signed Leila's death certificate, the authorities had approved it, she'd been cremated, and that was that. Nor was she worried about his potential for violence. If John had been available when Ken had first convinced himself that his sister had been murdered, then Ken might have killed him; but she didn't think he was the kind of man who could nurse a murderous grudge for months, plot coldly, and then act.
But the problem was now complicated by the fact that Ken was crazy about her. She'd sensed it in everything he'd done and said, mostly in what he'd not said, this evening. Letting him fuck her, letting him know that she wasn't the innocent little princess he'd imagined, hadn't turned him off: it had nailed him down more firmly.
She stepped under the hot blast of the shower, gasping as the fiery needles drummed on her flesh. She stood it as long as she possibly could, until she was almost ready to scream, before she added a little more cold water and made the torrent slightly less unbearable.
It was John, really, that she was worried about. She loved him, but she knew his limitations. She knew that he fell apart under pressure. Ken would continue to hang around-perhaps not to play detective anymore, but to be near her, to be available if she needed protection from the brutal father who made her scream at night. She laughed aloud.
But it wasn't funny, she told herself. Ken's continued presence would be a constant source of pressure on John, and he would eventually go to pieces. He might attack Ken and get himself killed. He might even confess. And what if she forgot herself and screamed during an orgasm, Inspiring Ken to come bursting in with a gun in his hand? No, Ken had to be persuaded to go away; or otherwise disposed of.
She stepped out of the shower, briskly toweling her hair. She began thinking about Carol again.
John thought about mixing himself a second gin and tonic but decided against it. He was a little tight already, and he knew that he ought to think things through with a clear head. Instead he took the last of the sodas left over from the picnic.
The picnic. He snorted, sardonically amused with his own innocence. It had been a good day. He'd written almost four thousand words. When he hadn't been working, he'd been thinking about how pleasant it was that Melody and Carol were getting together, making an effort to know each other.
A good day indeed: soured a bit by Melody's date with Ken, but then it had progressed to a new peak with Carol's unexpected complaisance. In the evening he'd felt warmly disposed toward the world, even toward Burke.
And then Melody had taken a sledgehammer to his pretty bubble-one, two, three-Ken's identity, her submission to him, her lesbian liaison with Carol. He didn't know which fact tormented him most.
He walked to the window and stared at Burke's darkened house. Perhaps Burke was staring back at him from the darkness. Byrnes, he should say. It was ... unthinkable. That fact alone numbed him. Leila had often spoken of her big brother, the one who could jump higher and run faster and fight harder than any boy on the block, the high school football star whose celebrity had rubbed off on her, getting her invitations to parties, bids to join organizations, that she might not otherwise have gotten. He hadn't been able to return from South America in time for Leila's hasty funeral, and so John had never met him, Until now, of course.
He knew that he ought to be thinking about defensive strategy, perhaps thinking about fleeing somewhere and covering his tracks well, but all he could think about was Melody. He thought of her with an uncomfortable, unfamiliar feeling. He recognized it. He realized that he was scared of her.
A snake could have given her lessons in human warmth. She'd coldly given herself to Ken to gain his confidence. She'd given herself to Carol on a whim, to amuse herself. Worst of all, of course, she'd murdered Leila. He'd lived with that fact for a long time, but the fact had been comfortably insulated by a thin layer of uncertainty. Now the insulation was gone.
He told himself that he had no right to judge her. He'd killed Jean by not going for help as fast as he might have. Any jury apprised of the facts would convict him of manslaughter. But Jean's doctors had told him that she was suffering from irreversible mental degeneration. She would have spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals, mostly in, eventually turning into a vegetable while the medical bills ate away her money and most of what he would ever hope to earn. It wasn't quite the same thing as slipping rat poison into your stepmother's tea, or however Melody had administered it.
He toyed with an idea that he didn't like, an idea that he always swatted down whenever it came unbidden to his mind: that Melody had inherited her mother's condition. The doctors had assured him that the disease could not be inherited; but those were the same doctors who had been powerless to treat the disease in Jean, who had been divided on its cause and treatment. It was strange that they should be so positive on that one point while confused on all others.
As usual, he rejected the idea of an hereditary curse. If Melody was what the shrinks would call a sociopathic personality, there had been plenty of influences in her environment to explain it. Jean had resented her birth. She'd believed that the baby was wise beyond her years, that even from her cradle she was mocking her, teasing her, tormenting her. In some of her bad spells, she spoke of changelings-offspring left by demons in exchange for human children. From infancy, Melody had been screamed at, cursed at, even beaten. Jean had alternated those episodes with effusive affection that Melody had seemed to find equally unwelcome.
And then, Jean's death. Melody had been there. She'd known what was going on. The incident would have given a sensitive child food for thought, to say the least. Add to all this a rather passive father, a man of no special moral convictions who wrote pornographic novels and was too disorganized to keep them out of his daughter's hands, who didn't have the will or the guts to kick her out of his bed when she'd first crept into it ...
Yes, he was scared of her; and he was scared for her, thinking of what she would become. What would she be like at eighteen, at twenty-five? She'd already learned all there was about manipulating people, and she played with them like toys. Maybe she had a right to. Maybe she was the next step in evolution, a creature as far beyond man as man was beyond the chimpanzee. He checked that line of thought. He was romanticizing, perhaps generating an idea for a novel, not coming to grips with his problems.
The biggest problem, the insurmountable one, was that he was in love with Melody. And his carnal love hadn't blotted put his paternal love. The two forms of love coexisted, feeding on each other, reinforcing each other, creating an overwhelming force that he could neither understand nor resist.
Something tickled his cheek. It occurred to him that it was a tear. He saw that he had crushed the empty can of soda in his hand. He let it drop. His fingers hurt when he unclenched them.
He realized that he hadn't heard the sound of the shower for a long time, but Melody had not yet returned from his room.
Carol was wide awake now, with no hope of sliding back into the halfworld of bright images while Melody was in the next room, naked under the shower. She wondered if John had gone to sleep on the couch. Maybe. He'd drunk a lot.
It would have been bad enough, lying here and imagining Melody's sleek nudity separated from her by only a thin wall; but the sound of the shower revived fresh memories of sensual delight. She remembered leaning forward under the rain of hot needles, gripping the towel bar, feet spread on the wet tile, while John slipped his big cock in and out of her. Something about the wet warmth of the shower had added a new dimension to the deliciousness of the experience, and she found herself reliving it now.
She resumed the slow stroking of her cunt that she'd begun while half-asleep, but now she did it deliberately, courting release from the excruciating tingles of desires that rippled through her body. The object of her desire was uncertain, wavering: first she thought of John fucking her in the shower, then she imagined embracing Melody there, and they alternated in a licentious dance through her head.
Then she moaned aloud as her desire reached a new pitch when she pictured all three of them locked in a lascivious embrace. It was a crazy idea, she knew that even while she entertained it, but it was almost unbearably sexy. She nibbled harder, her wrist flailing, as she toyed with the possibilities ... eating Melody while John fucked her ... eating John while Melody ate her ...
The cessation of the shower shocked her like a crash of noise. She pulled her sticky fingers away from her pussy and lay still for a moment. She pulled the sheet up over her naked body, suddenly ashamed of her lubricious thoughts and actions.
The bathroom door opened. A wedge of light fell into the room. Melody stepped into it as into a spotlight, looking into the darkness at Carol. She wore only a towel styled like a Egyptian headdress over her hair. This touch made her look even more exotic than usual; and by hiding her hair, the towel riveted attention on the strangely feral bone structure of her beautiful face.
"Do you want me?" she asked in a very low voice.
"Oh, God," Carol groaned. "Yes!"
Melody poised a finger delicately at her lips, cautioning her to silence, and padded quickly toward the bed with sinuous grace. Carol threw the sheet down, turning to meet her, and in the next moment they were locked in a close embrace, kissing eagerly.
Even while gripped by a raging excitement that left little room for thought, Carol marveled at this further step she'd taken in depravity: John was in the next room, probably not yet asleep, and here she was making love to his daughter on his bed. The thought added a special spice to her excitement as her questing fingers groped their quick way to Melody's cunt.
Melody nudged and guided, obviously with some specific goal in mind; Carol, passive, followed her lead. Soon Carol lay on her back with Melody on top of her, kissing her, holding her tight with one arm.
Suddenly, shockingly, Carol felt a thickness of rigid flesh pushing into her cunt. It squeezed the lips wide, pushing deeper. Alarmed, now knowing what to believe, Carol hastily grabbed for the thing that was burying itself in her cunt.
She almost laughed with relief. Melody was holding the thumb and fingers of her right hand closely together in a rigid bundle. With the back of her wrist against her pubic mound, she was holding her hand at right angles to her body as if it were a cock, pushing all of her fingers into Carol's pussy. She pushed with her hips and withdrew, pushed with her hips and withdrew, until the illusion that she was actually fucking her was complete.
Carol encircled her with arms and legs, giving in to this curious masquerade. It was thrilling, but it was weird. Melody's face was at hers, she was kissing her, Melody's hips were moving, fucking her.
"Fuck me, yes, fuck me!"
"Shhh!"
John had turned out the lights in the living room. The bedroom door was outlined in dim light, and he believed that it was the light from the bathroom beyond it. He stood outside the door for a long while, feeling oddly helpless. It was the same sort of feeling he'd had as a child, when his parents had excluded him from grown-ups' doings.
He wanted to know what was happening in there. He wanted to be with them. But he didn't want to interrupt an innocent session of girl-talk. However he was certain that that's not what was going on in there. Pressing his ear to the door, he heard nothing at all, and that convinced him that they had taken up where they'd left off this afternoon.
Ashamed of himself even while he was doing it, he knelt by the door and put his eye to the keyhole. He could see the open door of the bathroom, confirming his guess about the source of the light, but he couldn't see the bed. He got up hurriedly, feeling foolish.
He extended his hand toward the doorknob but withdrew it. He couldn't honestly tell Melody that this was wrong, nor could he rebuke Carol for her behavior. But he had to admit to himself that it wasn't as an outraged parent or a shocked fianc� that he wanted to enter the room. He wanted to join them.
The temptation was intense. He recalled the day when he'd been fucking Melody while talking to Carol on the phone. That had been a strangely exciting experience, talking to one woman while making love to another. But it paled beside the thought of making love to both of them at once. His cock stiffened as he thought about it.
That decided him. He removed his clothes quickly and tossed them carelessly aside. He hesitated. What if they were both fully clothed, engaged in a friendly conversation, and he walked in there stark naked with his stiff prick sticking out in front of him? But he was sure they weren't. They'd been in there too long, and he could hear nothing at all through the door.
He put his hand to the knob and turned it slowly. He was prepared for the disappointment of finding it locked, but it wasn't. He didn't breathe. He was able to unlatch the door without a telltale click, and he let the door drift partially open.
He heard sounds then, a rustle of sheets, a faint complaint of bedsprings, a wordless whimpering that he recognized as Carol's. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and as he sidled through the door he could see with relatively clarity by the glow of the bathroom light.
Carol lay on her side, her back toward him. His eyes traveled down her back to the pale, voluptuous fullness of her ass. Melody's head, her hair unbound and dark with dampness, lay in the fork of Carol's legs. He saw the glitter of saliva on her tongue as she lapped steadily and daintily, like a cat at a dish of cream.
His eyes traveled back to Carol's head, bobbing rhythmically in Melody's crotch. Their hands wove patternless tracings on each other's naked body. He drew closer. Carol's whimpers came clearer, and he could even hear the wet sounds of their greedy licking. His excitement became painful as his cock hardened like an iron bar.
A glint of light caught his attention. It was the light glinting from Melody's eyes as she watched him. Her teeth gleamed in the dimness. She was smiling at him. The hand that had been caressing Carol's ass was lifted, beckoning.
Carol felt the bed sinking behind her. She didn't know why it was doing that, nor did she care. She felt only a vague irritation at being forced to shift her position, to move over to avoid falling out. She snuggled closer to Melody.
She felt a hot, thick firmness pushing into her cunt while Melody continued to lap her clitoris. She murmured with pleasure, thinking that Melody was again playing that trick with her fingers. She had made her come once already that way.
Then she felt the body behind her, the hairy chest pressing her back, the big hands caressing her. She stiffened and began to struggle, but she was trapped between father and daughter. Melody gripped her head with her thighs, holding her face in her crotch. John's cock was already deep inside her, pinning her. Slowly, fearfully, she relaxed.
John stroked her back gently, sensing the tension that had vibrated through her when at last she had sensed the truth of the situation. He fondled one of her big breasts, noting that the tip was as hard as a ruby. He felt her going limp as he squirmed closer, burrowing into her with his steely-hard prick, and he reached out to stroke Melody's sweating buttocks.
He felt a delicious sensation that he couldn't at first identify at the base of his cock. It was a moist tickle, unlike the surges and squeezes that Carol's pussy was lavishing on the hot length of his prick. Then he realized that an inch or so of his phallus must be protruding from Carol's cunt-lips, and that Melody was licking him.
His suspicion was confirmed when he felt her tongue moving lower, probing through the hair of his balls. When he unsheathed part of his cock from Carol's cunt, she went to work on that, too, slurping Carol's hot juices from his cock as he pulled it out.
After John had joined the party, Carol thought that nothing on earth could ever shock her again; but she'd been wrong. Melody was still down in her crotch, moving her head, apparently licking something, but Carol could not longer feel her tongue. It took her a moment to figure out that the girl was licking her father's balls.
If anyone had described this situation to Carol, she would have been sickened and repelled. She could never in a million years have imagined herself participating in such an orgy. But now, even though she was shocked, she accepted it. However surprised she might have been at first, this was simply something that was happening, and whatever was happening here was good and beautiful.
She had to work up her courage to do it, but she finally managed to say: "Don't forget to lick me, too, Melody."
Melody stifled a laugh as she pictured Carol's reaction in the morning, when she would wake up and remember all the incidents of this eventful day. She might decide to run and keep running when she recalled all the things she'd done and said.
Melody thought that would be a shame. If John had to marry somebody, or thought he had to, it might as well be Carol. Not only was Carol beautiful and sexy, but she also was easily led. Now that she'd been initiated this way, she could hardly raise a fuss about sharing John- unless, as Melody feared she might, she reacted violently against her initiation in the morning.
She tried to prevent that by pleasing Carol now, pleasing her so much that it would be impossible for her to rebel against what she's done. While John fucked her at a steadily increasing pace, Melody took the hard little button of her clitoris between her lips and lashed it with her tongue, making Carol moan with delight. Her clit swelled slick and hot while Melody licked her and John fucked her.
John leaned forward to kiss Carol on the cheek. She was sucking Melody's cunt, but she paused momentarily and turned her lips to meet his. As his tongue tangled with hers, he tasted a hint of the flavor of Melody's pussy, and felt the slickness of his daughter's juice on Carol's lips. He leaned forward a little further until his face was in Melody's crotch, and he kissed her cunt, too.
He wasn't doing it to see what Carol's reaction would be. He was doing it because he wanted to kiss Melody's cunt. But he was pleased to note that Carol's reaction was a low, throaty chuckle. She turned and kissed him again as he withdrew, and then she returned to eating Melody.
Carol's cunt felt a lot hotter to John than it had when he'd screwed her in the shower. It was looser and wetter, too, a slobbery little geyser of sexual ooze. Apparently Melody had worked her up more thoroughly than he had. He wasn't jealous of that, though, since his prick was deriving the benefit of his daughter's preliminary actions.
She was more active, too, squeezing and rubbing her pussy around his cock with innovative zeal. He fucked her faster and drove his prick deeper into the hot squeeze of slithery jelly. Melody would occasionally lean in to give his cock a few licks, but most of her efforts were concentrated on Carol, too.
Carol was no longer entirely sure what was happening. The steady, rhythmic hammering of John's cock had become like the heartbeat of the universe, overpowering, all-compelling. She was aware of the strokes of Melody's tongue as a kind of counterpoint to the main theme, but one that sometimes burst forward and became even more important than the driving, surging pulse in her vagina.
"Oh, God!" she moaned. "Both of you-you're both-doing it-I love you-now! Ah!"
John winced as Carol's moans grew louder, wondering what Ken would think if he heard her screaming, too. But she proved to be not as uninhibited as Melody in her orgasmic cries. Her moans dwindled, became sobbing gasps.
When he was sure that she was satisfied, he pulled the slick length of his cock out of her pussy, meaning to cool it off for a while before starting on Melody, but she eagerly seized it in her mouth between Carol's legs. Carol propped herself on her elbow to watch as his daughter sucked his cock, but he was surprised and pleased to see that she was smiling as she watched. She withdrew her legs and curled them beneath her, giving Melody more room to suck Mm off while he knelt on the bed.
Carol wasn't content just to watch, though. While Melody blew him, she reached out and took the exposed root of his cock in her thumb and forefinger, jerking it quickly in a rhythm that syncopated the pumping of Melody's lips.
"Want a turn?" Melody asked, releasing John's cock from her mouth for a moment.
"Mmmm," Carol assented, leaning forward from the waist and lowering her face to John's prick.
They took turns for a long time, one sucking his prick while the other licked his balls, Sometimes they would lick it from either side, giggling when their tongues met around the stiff shaft between them.
John wished it could have gone on all night like that, but the scalding bath he'd received in Carol's superheated box had put his prick on a thin edge of control. While Melody was sucking him, he realized that he could no longer hold onto the rampaging eruption that was about to boil over. He grasped her shoulders, growling with pleasure, as his cock began pumping its hot load of seed into her sucking mouth.
Chapter Nine
The wedding was a simple civil ceremony. John had no particular friends in Lunalia, and neither he nor Carol had any relatives they cared to invite. The witnesses were Carol's local lawyer, the Sidney Greenstreet look-alike, who had probably been tempted from his office by the opportunity to kiss the bride; and his secretary. Melody was there as a nominal bridesmaid.
Melody had suggested that John invite Ken Burke/Byrnes as best man, but John hadn't seen any humor in this.
Ken didn't pose as much of a problem as Melody had feared he would. The day after their date, he was gone from his house, and he didn't return for a week. He told her that he'd gone away to think things over.
Apparently he'd been more troubled by their sexual encounter than by his interview with John. He was still obviously in love with her, but he had apparently made a resolution to treat her with distant, big-brotherly affection. She found this amusing and did nothing to renew their intimacy.
She had been afraid that John would fall apart under pressure from Ken, but quite the opposite seemed to be taking place. Ken looked haggard, nervous, and red-eyed after his week's absence, and he came to look progressively more so. The thought of revenge had sustained him for more than a year, and now he was no longer certain that John had murdered his sister. Perhaps John's words had convinced him, but Melody believed that she had more than a little to do with it; she guessed that Ken was simply incapable of believing that the father of the girl he loved had murdered Leila. The sudden disappearance of the obsession for revenge had left a vacuum in him, and he was showing the strain.
Nevertheless, he still worried her. He showed no inclination to move away, and she was sure that his continued presence would eventually have a bad effect on John. He continued to ask questions, too, even though he was no longer sure what answers he was looking for.
John and Carol had no desire for an extended honeymoon. They planned to spend a long weekend in Miami. Melody was invited, but she thought it would be polite to decline and let them have a few days alone together.
Melody was a self-sufficient person. She liked to be alone. So the prospect of spending four days by herself in the beach house neither bored her nor upset her. On the contrary, she looked forward to it as a little vacation. Much as she loved John and liked Carol, the small house seemed crowded with both of them in it. She hoped that Carol could be prevailed upon to buy them a bigger place soon.
Alone now, she laughed aloud as she remembered how she'd narrowly averted a disaster. Carol had convinced herself that easy money would ruin John's talent. She was thinking seriously of giving all her money away so that he would feel obliged to keep plying his craft. Horrified, but careful not to show it, Melody had gently led her away from that idea, convincing her that John was made a sterner stuff and would be able to resist the temptations of luxury.
She hadn't told John about that yet. She would wait till he returned from the honeymoon.
"Shit," she said aloud, as somebody knocked on the front door.
She was naked, and she didn't feel like putting any clothes on. Nor was she happy about having this first pleasant taste of solitude interrupted. She thought about not answering at all. But she knew it was Ken, and he knew she was home. He would keep knocking, and then he would probably break in if he got no answer, fearing for her safety.
Grumbling, she snatched up her beach robe, belted it tightly about her waist, and went reluctantly to the door.
"Hi, Melody."
"Hi yourself."
He was disconcerted by her coldness. She realized that it would be a tactical error to alienate him completely, so she put on a smile.
"May I come in?"
"Sure."
He followed her into the living room. "I guess your father has left, huh?"
"Yes."
"Is something wrong?"
"No. I was taking a nap, Ken. Is there anything special you wanted to see me about?"
"I'm sorry, Melody. I'll come back later if-"
"No, I'm awake now," she said, lighting a cigarette.
She studied him. He looked more haggard and nervous than ever. He prowled the room, picking things up and putting them down with no apparent design. One of the things he picked up was the copy of Where The Bones Are Buried, and he held it and looked at it for a while.
"John wanted to know if he should give you an autographed copy."
He shot her a wild-eyed look, obviously unappreciative of her sense of humor. He put the book down.
"Melody. I've got to be certain."
"About Leila, you mean? I thought-"
"I've got to make sure," he interrupted.
"I don't see how you ever will be. He didn't do it. I'm sure of it, and I was there."
"But there might be something. Notes for this book, maybe. A diary. Something."
"Oh, for God's sake, Ken. 'Dear Diary, I took a walk in the park this morning. Murdered my wife this afternoon. We had roast beef for supper and watched television.'"
"I didn't come here to be laughed at."
"Then you shouldn't have come here."
He stared dully at her. "Then you won't let me take a look?"
"What, poke through my father's things while he's not here? Get out, Ken. Maybe I'll let you apologize later, but right now I want you to get the hell out of here."
He stared at her for a moment longer. Then, without another word, he turned and left. She heard his car staring up a few minutes later.
She mashed out her cigarette in exasperation. She was mainly annoyed with herself for underestimating the strength of his obsession. It was certainly stronger than any feeling he had for her, she'd seen that plainly in his eyes. She was afraid that he was now more than half crazy, that he might do something drastic.
Even though she'd belittled his idea that he might find something in John's papers, she was afraid that he might have. John was a compulsive writer. He did keep an irregular diary. He worked out his personal problems on paper. Even thought they lived in the same house, he sometimes wrote her letters, wanting to make sure that he had his thoughts on some subject in proper order. He might not find the confession of murder that he was looking for, but he might find something, a hint, a word, enough for his crazy mind to work on.
And, she reflected, he might be screwy enough to break into the place and look for what he wanted without her permission.
She didn't know what to do. It would take her a year to go through John's papers and make sure they contained nothing incriminating. Nor did she want to pry into his private papers, even for a good cause. She would have to call him, but she knew he hadn't arrived in Miami yet. She couldn't imagine what kind of constructive advice he could give her, though. Burn down the house, perhaps, with all the papers in it.
She jumped when a rap sounded at the door. It sounded "harder, more determined than before. She didn't recall hearing Ken's car return.
Through the screen, she saw a small, powerfully built man in a Smokey the Bear hat and loopy black sunglasses. He had a big star on his shirt pocket and a big gun at his hip.
"Officer Boulton, isn't it?"
"Dep'ty Sheriff, Miss. May I come in?"
"Sure, what the hell."
"Beg pardon?"
"I thought I was going to be alone for a while, and it seems like Grand Central Station around here. But come in. What's on your mind?"
She walked back into the living room, lighting another cigarette. She was certain that this had something to do with Ken Burke, even though she didn't know what; nor could she believe that he'd gotten the police here so quickly.
Beau Boulton was only a couple of inches taller than she was, but his posture took advantage of every millimeter. He strutted when he walked, and he wore his campaign hat on his forehead, almost touching his sunglasses. His hand often moved to his gunbutt as if he needed reassurance that it was still there. Using one of his Britticisms, John had once described him as a nasty piece of work. It was a very apt description, she thought.
"We got this here report about naked bathing," he said abruptly.
"Jesus Christ, are you serious?"
"You better believe I'm serious. This is a serious charge. And I'll thank you kindly not to blaspheme. Would you mind sitting down there, little lady, and facing me when I interrogate you?"
"I'll make a deal with you," she said, turning to face him. "You promise not to call me little lady, and I won't call you little man. Okay?"
She was so totally unprepared for what happened next that it took her a moment to realize what had indeed happened. She saw a burst of bright color before her eyes and found herself sitting in the chair. Only when the pain came did she know that he'd hit her across the face, very hard, with the back of his fist.
"I got a better deal. You keep your smart-ass wisecracks to yourself, and I won't smack you upside the head."
"You dirty little prick," she spat, fighting back tears of rage and pain.
She was equally unprepared for his next move. He reached out almost casually and seized her lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. He tugged, and she was forced to rise from the chair and follow him. The more promptly she followed, the less it hurt. She couldn't strike down his hand without doing worse damage to herself.
He took her a few steps, then kicked her feet out from under her. She fell heavily to the floor. When she tried to rise, he pushed his booted foot between her breasts and forced her down again.
"You just lie quiet," he said, standing with one foot resting lightly on her chest like some travesty of a big game hunter, "and let me hear you say 'Dep'ty Sheriff Boulton, sir' in your very sweetest and politest voice."
"Fuck you, creep," she snarled.
His boot pressed down harder, crushing her, forcing the breath from her body. She struck at his leg, kicked at him, but she might as well have tried to fell a tree with her bare fists.
"Stop it, stop-please-"
"Let's hear you say it. It ain't all that hard."
She raged against it, but she choked it cuts "Deputy Sheriff Boulton. Sir."
"Now, I guess you can say we got ourselves started off on the right foot," he said, and he laughed hard at his stupid joke.
He eased the pressure on her chest. She dragged gulps of air into her scorching lungs. She fought against an urgent desire to vomit.
"What you got on under that there robe, gal?"
She glared up at him. Impatiently, he tapped his fingertips on the truncheon he wore opposite his gun.
"Nothing," she said sullenly, sitting up when at last he removed his foot.
"That figures. We got this report about these two ladies running around bald-ass naked out to Deckert's Island, out there in the bay. You know anything about that? That wouldn't have been you, would it? You better take off that there robe, so's I can compare you with the description."
"You can't get away with this. You can't come in here-"
"I can do whatever I goddamn please with a little cunt-sucking whore from New York City. Take off that fucking robe, or I'll tear it off your goddamn back."
She pushed herself up and ran toward the kitchen for all she was worth. She had taken barely three steps before her progress was violently arrested. He had grabbed the back of her robe. She tried desperately to shrug out of it and keep running, but he was upon her before she could succeed, encircling her waist with his powerful arm. She got in one good shot, an elbow thrust back into his ribs, and she had the satisfaction of hearing a "whuff" of surprise and pain. Her satisfaction was brief. He gripped her unbound hair and twisted it. She screamed as he forced her to her knees.
"The robe," he said, giving her hair another vicious twist, and she let it fall to the floor.
"I got to admit I been tellin' you a little white lie, honey," Boulton said in an obscenely gently croon. "We didn't get no report. It was me that seen you out there, you and your new redheaded mama. I dang near cried, watchin' the two of you, thinking what a godawful waste it was for two such fine cunts to be messin' with each other."
Melody's mind raced back. She recalled the noise she'd heard in the underbrush, the scrambling she'd mistaken for a deer.
"Yesir, I tell myself, maybe that big-ass redhead is a confirmed bull-dagger, but this twitchy little piece of tail is doin' it 'cause she don't know no better," he continued. "So I figured I'd just mosey on over here and show you how it's supposed to be done. I figure I got a whole weekend to give you some real good teachin', while your Mama and Papa is away."
She was swept by a wave of dismay at the prospect of having to listen to this garrulous swamp-cracker all weekend. That disturbed her even more than the thought of rape. When she realized that it did, she couldn't control a laugh. That was a mistake. He struck the back of her head, knocking her sprawling on the floor.
"You got a whole pile of learnin' to do," he observed mildly. "Number one, you call me 'Deputy Sheriff-' no, you call me 'Mister Dep'ty Sheriff Boulton, sir.' Number two, you don't laugh 'less I say something funny. Lesson number three is comin' right up now."
She heard the creak of leather, the purr of his zipper. His hat went scaling over her to the other side of the room. She didn't want to look back at him. She lay on her belly and waited, thinking. There was no gun in the house, but the kitchen was stocked with an excellent set of knives. When Beau Boulton got-hungry, she was certain, he would tell her to do the cooking. Vividly, she imagined the pleasure of sticking the heavy, triangular French knife between his ribs.
"Turn over," he said, nudging her with his bare toe, then kicking her in the ribs when she didn't move fast enough to suit him.
She rolled over on her back. He was wearing only his khaki shirt, the star still affixed to it. She was a little surprised to note that she didn't find this ludicrous outfit at all funny. The sunglasses had concealed little black eyes set close to the bridge of his nose. They suggested two beads of buckshot rolling in a damp palm as they traveled over her body, trying to devour it all at once.
"Hot damn," he breathed. "You're a piece and a half. I'm gonna show you what it's all about, sugar. You won't have no urge to go suckin' on any cunts when I get through with you."
She knew the consequences of sarcastic remarks, so she suppressed three or four that rose to her mind. She would not now or ever give him the satisfaction of pleading with him. So she lay still and silent, glaring at him. She noticed that he found it very difficult to meet her eyes.
She was vaguely annoyed that the instrument of her impending humiliation was so insignificant. Beau had a dinky little dick, even though it was fully erect. It took her a considerable effort of will power to keep from commenting on it.
"We got plenty of time for all kinds of foolin' around later, honey," he said hoarsely, sinking to his knees between her legs. "I'm gonna get you to give me a nice blowjob later. I'm gonna get you to kiss every square inch of my skin before you get around to it. But right now I'm gonna plow you."
He almost flung himself on her, his arms pinning hers as his cock rammed around in her crotch, blindly seeking the opening. She made an effort to relax and minimize the pain, but her cunt was cold and dry when he shoved into it. She couldn't hold back a squeal.
"You, yeah, you like it already, I can tell," Beau gasped, grinding his hard flesh into her. "I heard you with that redhead, groanin' and moanin' and damn near screamin' your head off. I'm gonna make you do that, too."
She bit her lip, still struggling to relax her cunt. He wasn't waiting for her. He kept pushing ahead, deeper and deeper, even though it must have hurt him, too. But he was in a feverish state of excitement that probably made pain and everything else besides the fact that he was fucking her unimportant. He was red faced, sweating profusely, and he trembled in ever muscle as he shoved harder and deeper.
His excitement was so great that he apparently didn't hear the return of Ken's car next door. She heard the door of the car slam, then the screen door of his house, but Beau was deaf to the sounds.
"Oh-oh-oh," she moaned, gradually raising her voice, filling her lungs, raising her voice to a howl, a shriek: "Oh-oh-OOHHH!"
"That's what I want to hear, that's just what I want to hear," Beau grunted, beginning to hump her vigorously. "Only you don't have to holler like that in my ear."
"It's so good, I can't HELP it, I can't HELP it!" she howled.
"Yeah, yeah, I figured you'd like it once you knowed what it was all about, I figured-"
The screen door slammed. Beau tensed. He stopped fucking her, his cock half buried in her pussy, as he raised himself to stare at something beyond her head.
"Get off her, you bastard," Ken said.
"Get the fuck out of here!" Beau snarled.
Melody heard a clicking sound. "I won't tell you twice," Ken said.
Beau released her and got to his feet. She rolled over on her belly, gasping for breath, annoyed with herself for shaking all over. She saw Ken standing in the door. He was holding an automatic in his tight white fist, presumably the gun he'd bought to shoot John.
She turned to look at Beau. His hands were raised tentatively. He was edging very slowly backward to the spot where he'd left his pants. And his gun belt.
"What happened to your hard-on, Mister Deputy Sheriff Boulton, sir?" she sneered, and he glared at her.
"Are you all right, Melody?" Ken asked.
"Yes," she said shortly, getting to her feet. "Make him stand still. He's moving toward his gun."
"You heard her," Ken said.
Beau shot her a venomous look as she made a wide circuit of him and pulled his revolver from its oiled holster. Careful to stay out of Ken's line of fire, she walked toward him, examining the pistol.
John's thrillers contained lots of helpful information about firearms, and she had no difficulty finding the safety and flicking it off. When she was about three feet from Ken, she pointed the gun at his belt-buckle and pulled the trigger. She wasn't sure where her second shot hit him, because he was half spinning as he staggered backward through the door. He fell heavily on the porch, writhing with his knees hugged to his chest.
"What the hell," Beau said. "What the hell did you do that for?"
She cast him a cold glance as she picked up the automatic that had flown from Ken's hand. She worked the slide, ejecting a cartridge that had been in the chamber, as she walked toward Beau.
"Wait a minute, little lady. Please, wait just one minute. No. No!"
"Shit," she muttered, when the first shot missed him entirely.
"Holy Jesus, don't!" Beau cried, his voice rising to a high-pitched scream.
The second shot hit him right between his beady little eyes. He was lifted from his feet and flung hard against the wall, and the back of his head exploded like a pumpkin smashed in the street by Hallowe'en vandals.
Melody sighed, brushing her golden hair back from her face as the tension flowed from her body. She wiped Beau's gun on her robe and pressed it firmly into his dead hand. Then she walked to the porch, wiping Ken's automatic. He had stopped groaning, and his eyes and mouth were wide in a look of utter astonishment. A fly had already settled near the track of pink saliva running from the corner of his mouth. She put his gun in his hand.
Then she walked briskly to the telephone and dialed the police.
