The door to the hall burst open and Rolf appeared, his eyes wide and startled-looking. "Mom?" he called without looking in my direction. "Rolf! Oh, Rolf, thank God you're here!" He tensed, cords leaping into prominence in his neck and his face turning pale. Very slowly, he turned his head, his stare sliding from my dark bedroom doorway to the window where I stood. When he saw me his mouth dropped open and he gasped violently. Only then did I remember I was naked. My hands fluttered as if to snatch at something to cover my body with, but I stilled them. My terror had dissolved; there was no ghost that could hold a threat either for Rolf or me when we were together. And Rolf had seen-in that matter of seconds-everything there was of me to see. With deliberate calm, I moved away from the window to the center of the room.
It was just a sobbing in the night. Nothing ghostly about it. Nothing to bring a catch to my breath or make the hairs stiffen at the back of my neck. Just the sobbing of a lonely, hopeless woman when the world ought to be decently asleep and mercifully unaware. But oh, God, how lonely a sobbing it was!
CHAPTER ONE
A widow for twelve years, I knew all about sobbing with loneliness in the middle of a still night. That night, the loneliness was a haunting fabric that quivered in the desert air, each dry gasp set in it separately from all the others. A distant, quavering coyote cry wasn't as desolate, nor the uncertain chirp of a nearer cricket in the dust. And I could do nothing but lie silent, tense in the darkness, and stare with dry, aching eyes at the blackness where the ceiling must be. Coming disembodied through my open window, the desperate sounds could have come from any bedroom in the house-or from the sad old house, itself.
I knew better than that, of course, and I scolded myself for the fanciful notion as awareness seeped through me. I cursed my luck, too, for being awake in the first place. But it was one of those nights. Everybody has one once in a while. People who lie by themselves in man-less beds know a lot of them, though. They come with confused dreams and sweaty, prickling skin and a sense nothing will ever be right with the world again. They bring wide, burning eyes and an aching hunger of the body so intense it creates illusions of men almost real enough to fill the throbbing, pleading nest. Not quite real enough, though, and the throbbing grows and the soundless pleading sends its tendrils along helpless paths to tingling flesh, tightening muscles in frustrated spasms and making limbs writhe and twisting the torso and arousing surface nerves so the skin flames at the friction of the bedding.
In the moments before I'd wallowed free of my unremembered dreams and oriented myself, I'd already kicked away the perspiration drenched sheet and while I listened helplessly to the persistent sobs I wiggled resignedly out of my pajamas. Nakedness, itself, would stimulate and tantalize me, but it wouldn't pour sensations into me the way resisting cloth would.
With my flesh exposed to the sweat sucking desert air and my agony of desire slowly dulling, I focused my thought on the sobbing. After all, I wasn't making any noise, and that left only three other women in Casa del Gato. There was Rose Duncan, a translucent-skinned wisp of a woman with eyes that were great, dark pools and a sinuous grace to her curves that promised a fiery responsiveness I knew the poetess didn't permit herself. She certainly wasn't crying in the night! She was lying next to John Jacob Duncan, for one thing, and the thought was enough to send fierce tingles along my spine and tighten the ring in my pussy. Not that she'd take advantage of having the great, muscular body next to hers, of course. But she couldn't know real loneliness with it there, either. Besides, even if she had a nightmare and imagined for a moment she were lonely, John was too tenderhearted and compassionate to let her sob for more than a moment. He'd have cradled her in his arms and whispered reassurances and slipped nonsensical quips into his, words until even a damned female writer would have found her sobs turned to giggles.
It wasn't Kim Gamiski, either, I was sure. Not with her platinum-blonde crown and vigorous, goddess-like body and eager, sensuous movements. Blaine was in her bed. And however intensely I distrusted the darkly suave self-confidence of the man-or however much he reminded me of the defanged rattlesnakes he kept in the Painted Rock compound, Kim loved him. And if she'd awakened feeling lonely she'd have been astride him by the time he could have shaken off sleep.
That left Maria. Strange child, Maria. Full-sexed and all woman for her nineteen years, she might conceivably be lonely. In fact, she ought to be lonely, isolated miles from anybody but her relatives-rugged, bone racking, Jeep miles, at that. But she was as strong a child as she was vital and sexy, and long before loneliness could reach the depths those sobs came from she'd have set her jaw and thrown a demijohn of wine into her Jeep and found the company she wanted. Still, there was a little of the quality of her voice in the sobs and there was nobody else....
I awakened the next time in that brief, dawn chill that comes to the desert when night air stirs to yield to the coming of day. The thin film of a sleeping body's perspiration evaporated with the air's movement and I twisted petulantly before I remembered I was naked. Having cheated my alarm clock out of its chore by a half-hour, I took a more leisurely shower than usual. Slippery with lather, I even forgot myself long enough to arouse myself shamefully by my absent-minded rubbing before awareness rushed upon me. Tingling and raw with the desire that I'd come to know so intimately in the years the raising of my son had precluded the exercise of a woman's hunting instincts, I hurried to dress and left my room.
Rolf was coming out of his room when I stepped into the hall. Clear-eyed and vibrant, he showed no sign of sleeplessness.' But I asked, anyway.
"Did you hear anybody crying during the night?"
"Huh?" He stared. "Crying? Naw, I didn't hear anything, Mom!" And he grinned. "Sleeping's too good here in the desert for a guy to hear anything!"
I felt a rush of elation; it was incredible my son could have changed so in the few short weeks we'd been at Casa del Gato. From a moody, depressed fifteen-year-old with flat, unintelligible responses, he'd blossomed into an erect, eager boy with a ring of enthusiasm in his voice. The desperate gamble of tearing him away from the sour, disillusioning crowd in Cleveland had paid off, despite the absolute lack of companionship in his age bracket here. And I couldn't have expressed my gratitude to John Duncan at that moment.
A woman on her own has limited choices. When she's responsible for a healthy, growing adolescent boy, the limits shrink even further. John Jacob Duncan and Casa del Gato had sounded so nearly perfect I'd applied without hope; there had to be thousands of qualified secretaries who'd jump at the chance to work with one of the country's leading authors-and in the same house with another, Blaine Gamiski, and one of the hardest-hitting women in American nonfiction, Kim, Blaine's wife, as well as that poignant voice of poetry's neo-Renaissance, Rose Duncan. The very feature of the position that appealed to me most, though-a chance to isolate Rolf while he found himself-evidently decimated my competition. John actually flew Rolf and me to Phoenix and met us there and drove us in his carryall-"Can't make it without four-wheel drive," he'd said, half in apology and half in pride-the sixty or so miles into the desert mountains to Casa del Gato so we could get the feel of the ancient stronghold before my committing myself.
Rolf had been doubtful. But I'd seen a gleam of interest in the way he'd hung over Blaine's rattlesnake compound and the leaping pulse in his throat as he'd tilted his head back to gaze at a wheeling hawk. And I'd known. We'd gone back to Cleveland only long enough to close out our apartment and suffer the bitter, foreboding objections of my in-laws. And for nearly two months, now, I'd secretaried for John and filled my spare time "helping out" with typing and proofreading and correcting for the other three. And Rolf had substituted his prying into the secrets of the desert for geometry and English. He'd even begun to acquire a certain fluency in Spanish from Maria. But most of all, he'd lost his defensive, harassed look and straightened his shoulders and found there was a voice in his chest.
As we approached the dining room I knew I'd be willing to go to hell and back to keep him here rather than return to our Cleveland apartment. And going to hell and back seemed the last thing I'd be likely to have to do as we joined the Duncans and the Gamiskis. They greeted us warmly-even "soulful" Rose-as if we were their defense against some awful desert fate. Rose almost surrendered her ethereal manner for earthy exchange as she took in Rolf's air of eagerness.
Giving me only the quickest of glances, she appeared to be talking to him. "I can't imagine what we did before you two came to the Casa!" she exclaimed. "As if it weren't bad enough living and breathing publishers and schedules and word shadings, without having the house suck us into the past! You're today, thank God!"
Rolf didn't say anything. As if he were paralyzed, he simply drowned in those enormous, black eyes of hers. But I protested a little.
John silenced me. "She's right, you know." He glanced at the somber portrait between the windows-Lolita de Vasca with her simple robe and the delicate chain that wrapped twice around her tiny waist and supported the graceful, mysterious key-and then down at Margarita the cat, rubbing against his leg. "Everything about the house is like a one-way road into the past. Hell, even Maria looks back instead of ahead! And at her age-and as sexy a little firebrand as she is-she's the last one who ought to do that!"
The door to the kitchen swung open and Maria backed through. Black, luxuriant hair swung at her back, its tips brushing her waist. Her hips swayed with unconscious invitation and her miniskirt revealed long, tapered legs whose curves would have made any man hold his breath. She turned cautiously, the great, gleaming tray piled so high it almost hid the proud, full breasts behind it.
"Give me a hand, John?" she asked. "Heavy as hell!"
John and Blaine moved to her simultaneously, and in a moment they'd relieved her of the load.
"How come you didn't yell?" asked Blaine, his eyebrow lifting. "Who the hell appointed you waitress?"
She jerked her head and her hair leaped. "Since when have I gone around asking a man to do woman's work?"
That was Maria, I thought uncomfortably. And John was right; she did insist on perpetuating customs that had died with her grandparents. She was fierce in her one-woman revolution to turn time backward. I studied her for signs of weeping. Surely sobbing like that I'd heard would leave its mark! But her skin was clear and her eyes were unmarred by anything that could have dulled their beauty. Thick, heavy lashes swept her cheeks. There wasn't a trace of swollen tissue or redness, and her expression shouted self-control and composure. I couldn't detect a single symptom of loneliness about her. Of course, she did have that faintly wistful twist to her mouth when she looked at John, but I felt that way, myself, and I was thirty-three! Any nineteen-year-old girl would suffer from puppy-love around a man like John.
I realized I'd stared too long at her. With an effort, I turned my attention to Rose. With the kind of skin she had, she couldn't possibly have hidden the effects of a night of sobbing. She couldn't even have covered up if she'd cried for two or three minutes! But her face, too, was clear of that kind of sign. She was simply making "soulful" cow-eyes at Rolf, as if there were something poetic about his young-animal zest for living.
And Kim damn well hadn't cried! How she'd achieved such a live head of hair after all she'd had to go through to give it such a rich platinum sheen.
I'll never know. With her gray-green eyes and tawny complexion and tall, lithe figure, I doubted one person in a thousand would have guessed she could be Maria's older sister. Even their mouths were two utterly different shapes! But where Maria evidently stuffed her sex-hungry vitality into sterile dreams about John, whom she couldn't have, Kim obviously nourished hers by unstinting recourse to the suave, alert capacity Blaine offered. And in her seething glances there wasn't a trace of loneliness or sorrow.
Seeing the way she devoured John with one lightning, rapacious stare jarred me for a moment before I could readjust my balance; no one had said so, but I felt confident that the two couples weren't entirely innocent of doing some "cross-pollination". Whether they had affairs going they tried to keep secret or simply enjoyed some kind of swap arrangement, I couldn't guess. But I'd have put my money on swap, as frank and uninhibited as they were.
Rolf wolfed his food. I caught Maria's warm stare of delight at the way he made her food disappear and knew he'd scored again in that department. And she'd done her usual splendid job in the kitchen; every third day was a gastronomical delight with the three women observing their rigid schedule of rotation. She'd prepared an omelet, with red and green pepper chunks. There were thin-sliced beef and steaming refried frijoles and thick, light cornmeal tacos. And for Rolf, there was a pitcher of cold milk.
After breakfast, I went to the library; my first duty of the day was the ceremony of unlocking-a custom John privately admitted to me he kept up to avoid losing the habit, rather than because locking and unlocking had any practical function at Casa del Gato. "One lousy time of forgetting is one too many when I'm out somewhere else," he'd commented that first day. "Make it automatic and you don't forget." And while I dusted and checked the typewriter ribbon and the paper and carbon manifolds, I became conscious of Maria.
Alone with her I couldn't resist the impulse to play detective. "Kim's hash must have turned to a hard lump in my stomach last night," I remarked. "I swear, I was awake half the night!"
"Oh?" She laughed without enthusiasm. "She never was much of a cook. I ate her stuff so long I got immune, I guess. At least I don't lie awake over that!"
"Somebody else was lying awake," I said. I was careful to keep my head down, but I watched her reaction in a mirror out of the corner of my eye. "For the longest time I heard someone sobbing. It made my flesh creep, it sounded so lonely and forsaken!" I thought her eyes widened for an instant.
"Must have been Lolita," she murmured with a chuckle.
"Lolita?" She might as well have said Pancho Villa.
"Lolita. You know. The portrait in the dining room?"
"Hm? Oh! John's aunt? But she's-"
"Dead!" Her voice held a note almost of relish. "Forty years. Long time to cry."
"Oh, come on. A ghost?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I've never heard it. But there's a legend...."
I hadn't heard it. In moments of relaxation John had given me the history of Casa del Gato and the generations of de Vascas who had peopled it; he hadn't mentioned ghosts.
Maria seemed amused. "They don't talk much about it. It's too depressing, I think. And then, Lolita's been quiet for a long, long time."
"Why should she start crying now?" It was idiotic conversation, but getting Maria to talk was something I hadn't accomplished often.
"Damned if I know. She stopped when Jennifer died. I don't see what would stir her up now."
"Jennifer! What did she have to do with it?"
"You wouldn't find anything like it today. But Lolita and John's mother-their parents were Eduardo and Consuela. Kim's and my father, Juan-well, he was their cousin."
"Okay. And he went away and came back with Jennifer Kimberly and Jennifer became your mother and Kim's."
She nodded. "He went away and brought back a wife-a gringo wife. And Lolita's sister Francesca married a gringo. But Lolita had grown up with Juan. She loved him and expected to marry him! The legend is she died of a broken heart-that she went to the Don of the mountain rattlesnakes and begged him to strike her so she could find peace."
It was true Lolita had died of a rattlesnake bite, I recalled. John had mentioned that to Rolf and me when warning us to be careful. Both Lolita-his aunt-and Jennifer had died that way.
Maria continued. "Only she didn't find peace. She haunted Jennifer-Mother-from that time until after I was born. And one day she coaxed the Don of the snakes to send a messenger to my mother's room. And Jennifer died the way Lolita had." She smiled. "Nobody heard Lolita's ghost again. She'd rid the house of the tigress who had stolen Juan's heart." She paused, then went on in a thoughtful tone, hardly more than a whisper. "Somebody said, when I was too young to understand, that Lolita's ghost would always protect Casa del Gato from any tigress who might come for a male of The Blood."
John's footsteps came to us from the hall and Maria shrugged again. "They say she walked from the family crypt to the house on dark nights-that Jennifer heard that chain of hers clinking-and the sobbing...." But her voice faded and she slipped from the room in time to bump into John on his way in.
There was a moment of stillness before she giggled briefly and excused her clumsiness. But she hadn't been clumsy-it would have been impossible for Maria to be clumsy-and she spent that moment pressed tighter to him than the collision would have warranted. Then she was gone and John came in to start work.
"Funny how little feeling Maria shows for her mother," I observed.
John glanced quizzically at me and nodded. "Talking about Jennifer, was she? Yeah, she identifies with Lolita, mostly. Got a thing about Mexican heritage. Likes to pretend gringo women are all predators, including her mother." He sighed. "I guess there was bad blood between those two. Lolita really hated Jenny for capturing Juan as neatly as she did. Never did forgive her!" With that quick shake of his head I found so endearing, he smiled and touched my shoulder. "But past is past, sugar. We've got manuscript to crank out. All geared up for another day?"
God help me, having him come into a room would have geared me up for anything any time! It seemed awful when I let myself look at it through conventional eyes, but I'd have become his mistress in an instant if he'd even hinted. I didn't have many illusions about myself, even then. And I knew I'd have taken my clothes off and made love to him right there in the library if he'd wanted that. And becoming his mistress while he continued to live with that "soul-filled" poetess of his wouldn't have disturbed me in the least.
But he didn't ask that; all he asked was another day's labor on the manuscript that was getting so close to its deadline. So we worked. I can't say there was a great togetherness in the work; he'd read and revised the previous day's output sometime late at night and was ready to show me what needed retyping. Then, while I did that, he paced and recorded, or slouched in the huge leather armchair before the window and gazed out at Maria's cactus garden and recorded, or wandered before the bookshelves and recorded. And when I'd finished the rework, he gave me the first tape for transcribing.
Once, he got agitated. "Oh, Christ!" He yelled at himself and paused to kick a footstool. "Dumb, muddle-headed bastard! Hey, love, is that tape I made Sunday before last where you can get your hands on it?"
"Sure. No problem."
"Look-I've got just a glimmer of an idea that's going to get away from me before I can nail it down. I've got to hear a piece of that tape!"
"I'll get it! Just take a minute!" I rushed out of the library while he resumed his pacing.
He wouldn't let me store his "source" tapes in the library. I haven't any idea what curious quirk established that kind of irrational requirement; maybe that was simply part of the eccentricity that constituted creativeness in him. But those, I stored in a case he'd brought to my room. He might have cut a hole in the library ceiling, I reflected as I hurried into the hall. With a ladder and a hole in the ceiling, I could have climbed directly into my own room. As it was, the main stairs lay at the end of that long, flag-stoned corridor. I hesitated at the niche on my right as I passed the end of the library projection, then entered and ran up the narrow, twisting stairway nestled there. And seconds later I ran down them and back to the library.
John looked up, his features a study in disbelief. "Forget your key? Good thing you thought of it before you got clear up there."
"No! Here!" I handed him the tape.
He gave me a puzzled frown, but he inserted the cartridge into his recorder and found the section he wanted. For a time, he listened and muttered. Then his expression lighted and he recorded excitedly into the other recorder. When he'd gotten the idea on tape, he turned to me and interrupted my typing again.
"Hey, love, you were hardly even panting when you got back here! What the hell?"
"What? I don't understand-"
"Hell, I know how long it takes to make that round trip! This goddamn house was designed for a cross-country runner! You just can't make it that fast! Nobody could!"
"John, I just took the shortcut!" Even as I said it, the cloud I'd been floating in all morning cleared. I bit the back of my hand while I stared into his incredulous face. "God, John! I know there's not one, but...."
The only thing he could believe was the source tapes were now hidden somewhere downstairs. But there had been a dark, twisting, dusty flight of stairs! Right at the end of the library!
"John!" I whispered. "John, let me show you!"
We went outside and along the corridor to the niche. Shadowed as it was, the dull black suit of conquistador's armor looked utterly evil as the empty visor seemed to stare out at us. Behind and on both sides of it the wall was solid and grimy, its adobe surface undisturbed.
I couldn't even raise my face to look at John. Shaken so badly I couldn't think, I stumbled the twenty feet to the next niche. But it was as innocent of stairs as the first. And my feet dragged as I turned back.
"John! John, they were right there!" I pointed past the armor. "I swear it!"
Very gently, he got his huge arms around the armor and tugged at it. "Concrete, baby," he muttered. "The old man had concrete poured in the legs and bolts set in the floor. Too damn many honorable people took a liking to antiques, he figured."
"But John! John, those tapes are locked in that cabinet in my room! Come with me so I can show you!"
"No. If you say they're up there, that's where they are." He smiled and squeezed me, and his voice was gentle as he continued. "So you're magic. Tell you what, let's take a break for a couple of hours. I've been killing you with the pace, and I know you've been doing stuff for the others when you should have been relaxing."
He might as well have sentenced me. For two hours I'd have to be away from the library and him. But I had no choice. It seemed forever to lunch, but I started to live again when I sat at the table and could look at him. I'd examined the niche as if my life had depended on finding a set of stairs. And I'd scoured the angles and recesses in the upstairs hall. I'd even used a magnifying glass in the desperate belief there must be secret doors concealing secret stairs. But of course, I'd found nothing.
I felt subdued during the afternoon, and John seemed to be watching me, worried. He thought I was cracking up, I told myself. He'd send Rolf and me away! And I was a total wreck by the end of our working day-frantic with self-doubt and consumed by lust for John that my preoccupation had kept me from suppressing as it had built. The climax came when Rolf failed to meet me at the door; of all days, he couldn't have chosen a worse one to stand me up! I'd counted on the buoyancy of his new enthusiasm to restore a measure of my stability.
I fretted. There were so many ways a fifteen-year-old boy could hurt himself around a place like Casa del Gato! But in an abrupt flash of insight, I recalled the way Rose had looked at him that morning.
Even a poetess as ethereal as Rose might sense inspiration in a vibrant young animal like Rolf!
Hardly aware of where my feet were taking me, I went to the southwest comer of the second floor, where Rose used a huge old sitting room for her composing. Entering through the arch, I hesitated behind the openwork stone baffle while I surveyed the shaded space before me. Only Rose's dreamy tones revealed her to me.
To my right, hardly visible in the gloom, she sat curled on a thick rug on the floor in front of an old couch. As my eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, I saw the highlights gleaming softly on delicate, coned breasts and a gently swelling hip. And even as I knew she was nude, I saw my son's figure sprawled lazily on the couch, his young brush of pubic hair apparently supporting a majestic hard-on. Rose stroked the magnificent cylinder with dainty fingers and crooned to the boy while he grinned fatuously into space.
CHAPTER TWO
I didn't hesitate. And I didn't try to fool myself. I was going to watch Rose and my son. Taut as I was, it was going to tear at me with forces I knew would make me a quivering wreck, but I could no more have slipped away from there and left the scene to my imagination than I could have handed my resignation to John. I edged into the shadow of a buttress beside the arch and, still screened from the view of the two carefree scamps, pressed my shoulder blades against the wall.
My overriding emotion was one of jealous fury. The poetess, with all her pretense of other-worldly detachment and her wraith-like withdrawal from the earthy awareness that charged the other members of the household, was behaving with my son in a way that could hardly have been more earthy. Worse! With a creature like John restraining himself by sheer will power from spending his enormous virility on her, and when it was all I could do to keep from begging him to spend some of it on me-when a wildly hungering woman like me was forced to do without-she was playing in a virgin plot I could easily have appropriated.
I knew Rolf. He was a healthy, vigorous adolescent with sex seldom far from the surface. I'd caught the stolen glances he'd so often directed at me, too. I'd seen him-without his knowing it, of course-when he'd stared at the mounds my boobies made under a tight blouse and licked his lips. And I'd certainly noticed the way he'd eyed the hem of a miniskirt hoping it would hike just a little more and give him a glimpse of the furry pussy it hid. He'd have fucked; he'd have panted with impatience and fire if I'd lowered my guard for a moment.
What infuriated me as I watched Rose fingering that youthful cock was that I wouldn't have suffered any great psychological trauma over letting him fuck me! I hadn't avoided incest because of any profound personal horror of it! I'd simply felt it would be fairer to let his first experiences be with somebody who didn't already occupy the mother role in his mind. His first sex ought to be wildly sex centered, without its object having any other significance to him!
The expression in his face while Rose fingered his cock awoke me from my resentment. From that part of my resentment, anyway. It was clear nothing but sex clouded his consciousness. He was plainly and shamelessly playing the part of a pampered youth, accepting what she offered without guilt or question. At that very moment, his dangling arm moved and he laid his hand over one of her breasts. Idly, he rolled the brown little nipple between his fingers while she drew her breath in with a hiss and convulsively tightened her grip on his cock...." And the fire of youth...." she whispered. "The fire of youth ... a reaching out of fingers ... a quickening of the breath ... and over all the sweetness of cock-scent...."
Rolf squirmed and grunted. "Mmm-hmm." And he twisted the nipple and tugged at it, stretching it and tenting the skin at the tip of her breast.
"Ahh!" she exclaimed explosively. "Rubber-banded tit ... and vise-gripped-too-big-mouth puckering cock ... and fire of youth that chokes a searing breath!"
I stifled a groan of recognition. She was! That was the style and those were newborn lines of the poem she was putting together now! "Ring-Shaft Spring," she'd entitled it! And every night I'd typed a few more lines she'd beat out on whatever forge she depended on during the day. That's where she pours her cock hunger, I'd thought with every new page. She spills it into words of raw lust and freezes it on paper and gives John the same old crap about creative sublimation!
She wasn't doing that today! I couldn't know what she'd give John, but she was physically experiencing the words and the beat she was putting together. She bent to kiss the trembling cockhead, a drop of thin, clear liquid vanishing as it coated her pursed lips. And the tip of her tongue darted out to strip the coating and jerk it into her mouth. She swallowed and sighed and licked at the seeping young slit.
Rolf twisted, his breath dragging between clenched teeth. "Awful hard to hold still," he muttered. "I didn't know they wrote poems like this."
"Darling, you don't have to hold still! Move! Be you, you wonderful thing of youth!"
His expression bland and calm, he slid his hand down her belly and into the gap between her thighs. Her slim ass surged reflexively and she thrust forward over him. In her momentary surprise, he drove his hand surely into place, clutching her pussy with his thumb buried in her pubic hair and his fingers digging at her ass. And his other hand slipped to her armpit. Heaving under her pussy, he swung her clear of the floor and guided her onto himself, her slender, artist's body falling on his youthful hardness and her legs sprawling astraddle of his hips. Too fast for her to adjust or to defend herself, he pulled his hand off her pussy and clamped it over her ass, trapping her on his waist, his cockhead lodged against the gleaming folds of her pussy lips.
I thrilled at the abrupt, straightforward action. Rolf had been as honest and efficient as I liked to be and he had only to thrust and she'd hang impaled on that rigid, waiting cock. But even in his directness, he'd had more luck than success. He'd been guided by instinct, not skill. His cockhead pushed at her cunt and her squirming failed to free her because her own half-musing fantasies translated to cooperation, rather than because of his technique.
A startling transformation came over her features. Her eyes, normally wide with what she passed off as poetic innocence, gleamed with the kind of hunger my body knew so well. She stared into Rolf's face with a fierce look of eagerness to match his. And she chewed on her lower lip.
"Oh, good heavens!" she murmured. "Oh, dear!" And when the mounting pressure of Rolf's hand on her back showed he was pushing her against his cock, "Mmph! Oh, no! Not yet, dear boy! The poem! That's not the mood of the poem!"
"Huh ... Oh! I forgot!" He looked startled and confused. His hips undulated and his cockhead jabbed repeatedly at the wet cunt.
Rose's hips jerked, too, and she was thrusting onto the tip of his cock in spite of herself. But it seemed she wanted to develop the situation at a slower pace so she could feel her way along the thread of the poem she'd been so engrossed in. I had to admire her strength of will; in her place, I couldn't have slowed myself once that meaty bulb was lodged in the embrace of my labia. I could only have pounded myself onto it, poem or no poem!
I couldn't really conceive of my son's being able to put on the brakes at this point, either. I smiled to myself, expecting to see his strong young body jerk with a spasm that would drive that quivering cock into the perfectly positioned cunt, spearing the poetess and ending the composition for the moment. He was too inexperienced and excited to do anything else.
But he surprised me. Beads of sweat stood on his face, but he eased her away from the poised cock and let her slide off him. She knelt on the floor again, her belly against the front of the couch and her boobies flattened where they rested on Rolf's chest. She took his cock in her hand again and played with it. And while she played-and while Rolf had to satisfy himself by feeling her pussy with one hand and teasing her nipples with the other-she continued to mutter the fragmentary bursts of lines for her poem. But her voice shook and the words grew rougher and more uneven; an earthy excitement was swelling under the poetic drive.
Whatever her response to the boyish fumbling, she couldn't be-in the state of turmoil I was. Endless nights of fruitless longing lay beneath the lust that seethed in me, heating it and goading it until it burst in a torrent of passionate need. I held my breath to still the cry of desire that welled from my throat. The throbbing in my pussy was so fierce I had to drive my fist into the soft flesh and clamp my thighs on my wrist to soothe it. My bra confined my tingling boobies until I felt as if I were encased in iron cups, and I unfastened the buttons of my dress from waist to neckline, thrusting my hand inside and jerking the bra cups up to free the hot flesh of my breasts.
I caressed myself, then. The sensation of dry, trembling fingers probing the sweaty tissues-skin on skin-released something good. I didn't hesitate to unbutton the dress the rest of the way and let it fall open, exposing the naked breasts and the damp-crotched panties. And I wasn't embarrassed for myself when I slipped my hand inside the waist of the panties and downward through the matted pubic hair to dig at the slippery membranes of my pussy.
Waves of pleasure made me sway as my fingers lovingly stroked the aching slopes between my pussy lips. And my hips undulated freely, thrusting out from the wall, jerking back to crush my ass against the rough adobe, then thrusting forward again. With my other hand, I massaged my breasts. And I watched the graceful fingers manipulate the pink nipples and milk the softer masses of tissue behind them.
But Rose appeared to be moving forward with her composing. She straightened, erect on her knees, and let her boobies dangle above Rolf.
"Both hands, darling boy," she said. "Play with them, Rolf."
He humored her, fondling the milk-skinned cones, testing their consistency, squeezing them and rolling them over her chest in circles. She rested one hand on his shoulder and clung to his cock with the other. Her head was tilted sharply backward, her hair loosening and letting thick strands slither over her shoulders. Her lips were parted and her eyes closed. And she continued to undulate her hips, rubbing her belly on the front of the couch.
Rolf twisted, licking at one of the dancing nipples with a grin. At Rose's sharp intake of breath and the flutter of her belly, he grabbed the puckered lump in his mouth and started sucking at it.
"Ohhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!" Rose moaned with delight. She twisted her shoulders and shook her head with slow, side-to-side sweeps. And her buttocks tightened and hardened, forcing her belly against the couch.
Rolf continued to grin around the partial mouthful, his expression reminding me of the way he'd grinned around the neck of a Coke bottle on those rare occasions in Cleveland when we'd shared a moment of happy laughter. It seemed to me, confusedly attempting to analyze him through the haze of my own fierce excitement, that he was enjoying the leisurely pace of their sex. He felt driven to brush restraint aside and fuck Rose. But he appeared to recognize the bonus of extra sensation he was collecting by letting her delay the conclusion of their activity. His smile was a surface evidence of the bliss he trembled from. And he let his hands rove unrestricted over the slim, naked body at his side. It was his first chance to explore female flesh that way with his hands and he made the most of it.
Rose was as conscious of the intimate manual caresses as she was of the sucking at her tit, to judge by her movements. Her torso writhed under his hands, even as she twisted her shoulders to control the movement of her boobies. And the muscles in her arms leaped erratically, showing the sudden bursts of pleasure she experienced from the touch of his hands as well as those his mouth produced.
I realized something was happening to me while I watched the eager familiarities. I discovered I was wishing Rolf were with me instead of with Rose. It wasn't an abstract, all-inclusive desire for my son to fuck me, but a specific, fierce wish that he were running those young, unspoiled hands over my curves and warming my naked flesh with them instead of hers. The power of my excitement was so great it drowned every semblance of judgment. I promised myself I'd have him in my little private sitting room after supper. That I'd undress for him-or let him undress me-and stand for him while he ran his hands over me the way he was feeling Rose right now. That would be all-just let him feel me-all of me!
I ran my hands over myself, pretending they were my son's hands. I ignored the way the displaced bra got in the way and the swinging of the loosened dress. And I ignored the way my panties spoiled the effect as my hands strayed tenderly over my hips and buttocks. Rose wasn't having to put up with those inconveniences, though. She wasn't having to pretend, I reflected. She was gloriously naked and vibrantly alive to the inquisitive strokes and jabs of young, uneducated fingers.
When Rolf again felt her pussy, his fingers vanishing into the shadowed tangle of red-brown hair at her crotch, she thrust her knees apart and settled onto his fingers. She twisted her torso at her hips, her shoulders swinging from side to side for a time, then from back to front, bending backward and jerking forward until her boobs touched his body.
And suddenly she yelled and leaped to her feet. "ROLF, DARLING! I've lost it, darling! I outran the poem and I can't go back!"
He grinned doubtfully. His expression said clearly he was worried about her next move. If she withdrew from him the fun was over and he'd have to slide off the peak of his excitement the best he could. If she yielded to the lust she'd generated, he didn't care if she never got around to the damn poem. I knew the fear he had of her cooling, and I ached for him. But I knew, too, he didn't need to be concerned. She wasn't going to cool; she'd gotten too excited to let herself cool! And the light in her eyes as she stared down at the hard, young body was that of a hungry cat.
She flung one leg over him and knelt astride his waist. He reached hesitantly for her and she snatched at his hands, laying one on her hip and the other on her belly.
"Feel some more, darling!" she hissed.
He began running his hands over her again while her writhing resumed. In a moment, his fingers lay buried in her pubic hair and his thumbs were out of sight in the folds of her pussy. From the way his wrists moved and his hands twisted, I was sure he was digging at her cunt with the tips of his thumbs. And when she rose on her knees and reached back to lean her weight on her back-stretched arms the pink flesh came into view to prove I was right. He had both thumbs thrust into her cunt, and he was prying at it so it gaped blackly open.
Her hips jerked violently and her tits jumped. She cried out in a low, urgent voice, her pleasure ringing in it. "Darling boy! Oh, Rolf, you know just what to do!"
"Oh, shit!" I whispered to myself. "Sweet-talk him, you goddamn fake! Go ahead! Maybe you can tease him into making you come without your having to let his pecker inside!"
Even as I gave in to my disgust, I realized Rolf had suspected the same kind of treachery. His body was squirming in a cautious, barely perceptible movement that was sliding him toward the head of the couch.
With her head again thrown back and her eyes closed, Rose appeared too intent on her own pleasure to notice that the boyish body was slipping under her. Rolf kept her high in the air with his jabbing thumbs while his cock moved under the straining pussy. And he lowered her slowly, maintaining the stretching, prying force at her rim. As patiently as if he'd been working out a puzzle, he squirmed and twisted and arched until his cockhead was wedged against his thumbs. The rigid cylinder lay at a flat angle, barely off his belly, but as he began to slide headward again, leaving its tip wedged, the shaft rose like a lever. And with a deft, gentle tug of his hands he extracted his thumbs and let her settle onto his cock. The jerking shaft plunged upward into her, a sharp thrust of his hips driving it home even as she sank onto it.
Rose twisted, scrubbing herself for a moment on the base of the buried cock. Then she jerked erect and a wild-eyed expression masked her face. " YEEAAGHHH! ROLF, BABY! DARLING BOY!" She glared incredulously at him. "What? Rolf, what did you do?"
He merely grunted. He sounded satisfied, as he did when he made that kind of grunt after finishing a slab of pie. His hands gripped her thighs, thumbs intimately cradled in the swollen flesh of her pussy and fingers clutching the outer slopes of the slender legs. Watching Rose's contortions, I realized abruptly he was holding her in place.
But she didn't struggle very long. She chuckled shakily and bent forward to rub his chest with her fingers. "You're a rascal, Rolf Kelig! You're not going to be taken in by a cheat, are you!" She laughed gaily, no trace of her literary affectation apparent, and jerked her hips. She was, suddenly and openly, fucking him! His hands slid to her hips, where they reinforced the rhythm of her pumping. His hips leaped to her rhythm and she lowered herself to hands and knees over him, her ass flashing in the feeble light as she jacked herself on his cock.
The cool amusement had disappeared from my son's expression. His face was sober and tense and sweat bathed him in his exertions. He watched the jerky swing of her boobs while his cock leaped in her. He grinned only briefly when the pins in her hair gave up their impossible assignment and let the thick brown masses tumble to hide her contorted face.
"Oooh! Oooh! I-don't-do this-very-often!" she gasped, her admission bringing a terrible, hard knot to my belly as I thought of John patiently denying himself the pleasure of her body while she cheated with my son.
If such a thought occurred to Rolf, he gave no sign of it. He thrust brutally, his cock driving upward into her, then withdrawing as she bounced into the air, only to stab deep into her cunt again when she plunged upon it again.
Frantic with desire, throat aching and tongue dry and swollen and breath coming in wheezing gasps, I pressed against the wall and mauled my clitoris with overeager fingers. I felt the paralyzing onrush of an orgasm and gritted my teeth while I changed the nature of the massage. Gently, lovingly, I stroked the side of my clitoris while the hardening knot in my belly trembled on the verge of eruption.
Rolf yielded to the intense stimulus of the flogging, voracious body above his. His heels and shoulders ground into the couch and he arched his body, cock uppermost. Lifted into the air and impaled on the raging young cock, Rose clutched at Rolf's wrists and flattened herself on him, her legs extending with a jerk and her entire weight borne on her pussy at the base of his dick. His buttocks jerked spasmodically; he was jetting his cum into the slender woman's belly! But she was coming with him. Great tremors shook her and I could see the contractions in her abdomen as she writhed on his spurting cock.
My own tension broke with the explosive violence of a shattered steel spring. I sagged helplessly against the wall while the convulsions twisted my vagina and stopped my breath. My knees sank and spread and my hips settled forward and my pussy thrust out to the desperate clawing of my fingers. I sobbed under my breath as the awful tautness began to subside and relief loosened muscles that had been tight too long.
CHAPTER THREE
Weak with physical relief from my orgasm and trembling from delayed reaction at what I'd watched, I edged toward the arch to get away. Rolf sank limply to the couch and Rose cuddled against him, her ass still winking with after-twitches and the continued presence of the softening cock in her pussy. She caressed Rolf's jaw line with her fingertips and dragged her tumbled hair across his hairless chest.
"Darling boy, darling boy," she crooned to him. "I'll have to write a different poem about you."
"Huh!" Alarm leaped to his eyes. "About me!"
"Of course, darling! You'll live forever!"
He objected. "Not me! I don't want everybody reading about the first-" He stopped abruptly. "You couldn't, Mrs. Duncan! You just couldn't! Mr. Duncan and the Gamiskis and-and-they'd all know!"
Good God! I thought. They would! And we'd be on our way back to Cleveland!
But Rose laughed with delight. "Oh, Rolf! You dear, dear boy! You're just absolutely delicious!" She wiggled, deliberately scrubbing her pussy on the base of his shrunken cock and rubbing her boobies-such as they were-on his chest. "Darling, don't be old-fashioned! We're all free spirits at the Casa! Even the ghosts!" She laughed again and shivered happily. "You'd really like it if you could learn to think the way we do."
"How?"
"Live, love and laugh! Except when you feel poetic, of course," she added hastily. "Do your own thing! Darling, you've got to get rid of all the quaint old ideas!"
"Like-like-"
"Like everything, dear boy! Be free! Think of the things you wouldn't dare do and go do them! Go make love to your mother!"
"Mother!" His eyes widened and his mouth stayed open.
"Darling, you know what? I'll bet she'd be wild about it. Why not? Be honest. You've thought about it, haven't you?"
"I-I-" His face turned crimson.
I imagined I could feel the heat of the flush clear over at the arch.
"Honest, now!" She persisted.
"Well-well, sure. I guess so."
"Still gets to you when you think about it, doesn't it!"
"Uh-"
"It does, darling! I can feel your pecker twitching when I mention it!"
"Uh-well, yeah-but-"
"Try! Oh, don't go and grab her and say, 'Hey, Ma, let's fuck!' That's dumb! And don't throw her on the ground and start tearing her clothes off!" She paused a moment with a musing expression. "I don't know, at that. That's something Anne might get real excited about. No! Don't risk it! Just be real confidential and close and take advantage of every little bit of encouragement. Dear boy, I know women! I'm a poet. I act like a poet's supposed to act, too. But I watch. And I know women. Your mother would let you fuck her at the drop of a hat!"
Rolf shuddered and swallowed. I guessed he was turning the idea over in his mind and visualizing me in the parental, disciplinary role. He breathed raggedly and his fingers worked where they gripped Rose's buttocks.
"Naw. Mom wouldn't let me do that. Mrs. Duncan, I-"
"Rose, darling! Rose! Isn't it silly to call me Mrs. Duncan when we're lying here like this?"
"Okay. Rose, I've never even seen her in her underwear! Not unless it was when I was too little to know! I couldn't!"
"You wouldn't want to?"
He was glassy-eyed. And as Rose thrust her shoulders back and cocked her head to watch his expression I knew she was seeing the same awe-stricken set to his jaw as I did.
"God! I mean, golly! Would I! Sometimes I wake up shaky and all wet with sweat from dreaming about it!" He grinned, abashed. "Only they weren't much, for dreams. They weren't anything like the real thing!"
She giggled and touched his lips with the tip of one finger. "I'll bet the next one's accurate!"
"I dunno; you and Mom aren't built a whole lot alike."
"Silly boy! When that sweet pecker of yours slides into her you're going to find out she feels just like me!"
"Maybe." But his tone held distinct reservations.
And I agreed mentally with him. If my pussy felt the same to a man as hers it would surprise me. But if it did, nothing else about us would feel or look alike! The momentary relief from tension my orgasm had provided was gone now. If Rose succeeded in giving Rolf the courage to make a pass at me I knew how it was going to end. And the idea of that youthful body I'd given life to pressed between my thighs and that eager young cock buried in my cunt made me ache all over with desire.
"Now I know the way you and Anne have your confidential little chats, darling. You have any idea how important those are to her?"
He cackled with boyish tolerance. "Sure. She-omigosh! Rose, what time is it!" He started up with alarm.
"Darling! Rolf, darling!"
"Good gosh! It's almost forty-five minutes since she finished work in the library! She'll be looking all over for me! Maybe even here!"
Reluctantly, Rose let him thrust her off. He scrambled for his clothes but slowed under the soothing insistence of her voice.
"Easy, dear boy! Easy! Don't be too fast or you'll do something wrong and give yourself away!" And she went back to the attack, making no effort to dress herself. "Just work the conversation around to sex, dear boy-like it's time you got to know more answers."
With a start of panic I realized he was nearly dressed. He'd be coming right through the arch I was hiding in! And I'd be standing there half-naked and trembling if I didn't do something! I jerked my bra into place and buttoned my dress at the waist. I couldn't possibly get all the buttons fastened before he got to where I was! And I'd rather have died than let him know I'd been eavesdropping!
I ducked into the hall and backed along the wall, my fingers working desperately at the buttons. First the one below my waist. Then the one above. Then the next one below it, a couple of inches above my crotch. And the one just below my boobies.
Rolf came out of Rose's study with a rush. His face was a mask of shock when he saw me. I faked near-hysteria and flung myself at him, my dress gaping where I hadn't been able to get it buttoned.
"Rolf! Son! Oh, thank God you were here!"
He caught me in his arms and let me cling to him. The trembling was real and the way I crushed myself to him. But the reasons I babbled were lies.
"Oh, Rolf! Rolf, baby! I was so afraid!"
"Mom! MOM! WHAT HAPPENED!"
"I couldn't find you! I thought something awful must have happened to you! I was changing clothes to go outside and look when I-when I wondered if you might possibly be visiting with Rose!"
He chuckled self-consciously. "And you came running." He held me away from him and surveyed the way my dress exposed my thighs and bra.
The heat in my face told me I was blushing. "I-I almost forgot my dress." I expanded the lie. "Got halfway down the hall before I realized I was just in my bra and panties. Oh, honey, I was so worried I didn't even want to go back and get it!" He replied in a low tone, the words hesitant. "Bet you'd have looked pretty good that way." And then, musing, "Funny how much difference there is in people. The way they're put together, I mean." His voice dropped to a near-whisper. "Like Ro-Mrs. Duncan. She's built nice, but not much meat. And Aunt Ellen in Cleveland. She was fat. You-you're like the kind they use for models in the photography contests."
"The nudes," I observed dryly. Ellen certainly wasn't fat. But she did have udders for breasts and pillows for buttocks. And as for photography magazines, I knew the sections he spent his time studying.
"Well, yeah. That's art. I guess that's the way the photographer figures the light and shadows make the best patterns."
We'd reached the door to his room. I stopped.
"Son, it's going to be time for supper in about twenty minutes. Better get ready." I glanced down at the flesh my dress was still exposing. "Maybe I'd better, too."
"Yeah. I suppose." He sighed. "A photographer's just as much an artist as a painter-or a poet, huh, Mom."
I nodded. I didn't trust my voice. He left me and went slowly into his room. I watched for a moment before going next door into my sitting room. As soon as the door clicked shut behind me I unbuttoned the dress again and slipped out of it. Carrying it in my hand, I went on into the bedroom. Rolf was wasting no time following Rose's advice. It began to look like he meant to start out with the nude photography approach. I had to admit it was a better line than the one Rose had suggested, but I was angry. I hated the woman! I'd worked hard to develop an atmosphere of honesty between Rolf and myself. He knew he could say anything-ask anything of me-without my criticizing him for it. I had probably denied his requests oftener than I'd granted them, but I wouldn't react to the fact he'd asked.
Sex had always been that way for me, too. With Rolf's father, during the few happy years before his death, sex had been a fine enough thing we hadn't played coy about it. And on the few occasions since his death when I'd abandoned myself to the pleasures someone had offered, it had been on the same frank basis. It hurt to feel Rolf couldn't trust our understanding enough to come out bluntly and ask if we could make love.
I was quiet at supper, still fretting about the way Rose had subverted my son. And I noticed three people demonstrating an awareness of that quiet. John was trying to decide whether I was showing another symptom of overwork and nervous tension, I knew. Rolf might be worrying about whether his quick introduction of the nude photography subject had been too abrupt after seeing me with my dress half-off. What Maria's special interest might be I couldn't guess. She was dividing her attention between John and me, though. And when she looked at him her eyes filled with adoration. Rose had said everybody at Casa del Gato did his or her thing; Maria didn't. Her thing was John, and it was obvious she hadn't gone to him with her love, any more than I had with mine.
After supper, John and I went through the ritual of locking the library. I closed and locked the windows and he checked them. I made a last careful survey of the room and so did he.
"Silly game, here," he muttered, as he had every time we'd done it since my arrival. "But when we're away-when we go maybe to Mexico City or Bangkok or Rome-or wherever we go to get the feel of the atmosphere and the stories next, you're going to have to watch me about this. I'm so damn careless."
He might as well have lighted a fire inside me! God! He really meant this secretary thing! He wasn't just thinking of it as a temporary expedient!
"John! John?"
"Huh? What's wrong?"
"That little candle lantern-that antique in the case-it's not here!"
"What! Jesus Christ, Anne! Where is it?"
"I've never seen it outside the case except that one time you showed me how it was made! And of course, I do dust it each day. You know how much dust seeps into the case."
"You dust it? Then it was there this morning?"
"Positively!"
He shook his head and stared perplexedly at the case. He even went to it and lifted the top. The felt showed the indentation the lantern base had made in the years it had been kept there, but there was nothing to suggest where the lantern was.
"Shit!" exclaimed John under his breath. "Why the hell would it be gone? I mean, there's nobody who'd want to steal it! Nothing to do with it if they did!"
Maybe I was looking for an excuse. I went to his side and leaned over the case, my head close to his. And I sniffed. There seemed to be an aroma around the case that was unusual enough to catch my attention. It wasn't an ordinary scent at all, but subtle and unique. I'd smelled it before, I was certain, but I had no idea where or when.
"John-what kind of perfume is that? Or what kind of a smell?"
"Huh?" He sniffed. "I don't smell anything."
"Come away from the case. Take some deep breaths and then go back."
He tried that. At the case again, he bent low and sniffed. "Well-I don't know. Maybe there is a scent-mighty faint, though-wouldn't want to have to identify it."
It wasn't that faint to me. It wasn't powerful, and the scent itself was the subtle kind, but it was there. And as far as I was concerned it was indentifiable. But there seemed nothing to be gained by pressing the issue. And John appeared ready to abandon his effort to guess what might have happened to the lantern.
"Hell, it isn't that important," he remarked. "Whoever borrowed it will bring it back sooner or later."
We finished the survey of the library and turned off the lights. John closed the door as we left and I locked it. When he'd checked and was satisfied it was locked, we were through for the night. We walked slowly and peacefully along toward the stairs and the living room. I paused when we started to pass the niche with the conquistador armor.
"John! That's where I smelled that scent! In that stairway that isn't here! And in the niche when we were looking at it!"
"Huh?" He reached the niche with one long step and sniffed audibly. "No smell but dust there now."
He was right. There was no hint of the delicate aroma. It couldn't have survived all day anyway, though, I thought. Not unless it had come from a liquid that had gotten spilled. And that wasn't the sort of fragrance it seemed to me. It was more like something a person would wear, leaving a tenuous clue in passing.
"How about a drink before you go up?" he asked in a solicitous tone.
"I don't think so tonight. Maybe the sleep would do more for me."
At the foot of the stairway, he hesitated for a moment and squeezed my hand. "Anne-" He could have been fumbling for words. "Anne, we're not the easiest people in the world to live with or work for. Don't give a damn for convention-don't think much of most people-do and say weird things. I mean, you've fitted in without a hitch so far. You seem to take things as they come. And everybody loves you." He grinned and seemed momentarily better at ease. "That boy of yours, too! He's like a breath of fresh air! Anyhow...." And it began to get difficult for him again. "Anyhow, no matter how weird and confused it seems-or what you might see-don't be too quick to bail out. Just remember, we do love you! All of us!"
Before I could tilt my face up, he kissed me tenderly on the ear and left me.
"Get a good night's sleep, baby. Don't do any work on anybody's manuscript tonight. Okay?"
"All right." I whispered and swallowed. Had he been talking about the secret stairs and the missing lantern and that scent? Had he been warning me in his own reserved way about Lolita's ghost?
I was slow going up the stairway. The tender warning and his exaggerated assurance of their feeling for me couldn't have put me more on edge. If there was something weird enough he felt he had to warn me about it-reassure me ahead of time-then it was going to mean more than a silly legend. And halfway up the stairs I recalled something else about that scent.
I'd smelled it in my room the night before! It had hung in the night air, so elusive I hadn't even been conscious of it, while I'd lain listening to the quiet sobbing. Three incidents, then, with nothing else in common, were somehow linked by a fragrance I'd detected under no other circumstances since I'd been here. Nor ever before, I reflected. I was certain of that; I'd never known that particular scent before coming to Casa del Gato. In a way, if a ghost existed it was that fragrance. That was the essence of the "spirit" that haunted the Casa.
When I went to bed it involved a struggle. I knew I must be overwrought, because I actually considered the idea of going next door and inviting my son into the sitting room for an evening of sex to go to sleep on! But I was sure such an assault would do more to terrify than to excite him. And there was a habit pattern I'd developed over a span of fifteen years; I was still a mother.
Shaken by John's warning, I left a dim light burning over my desk in the sitting room. And I left the door between the sitting room and my bedroom open when I turned out the bedroom lights. As if the previous night had established a precedent, I slept nude that night. And I think I slept without disturbing dreams.
But I awakened sometime long after midnight, as suddenly and completely as if somebody had taken my by the shoulder. Someone was sobbing. The same woman whose sorrow had kept me awake the night before had yielded to it again. I could do nothing but listen and perspire.
I couldn't pinpoint the moment, but the fragrance gradually forced itself on my consciousness-faint and elusive but unmistakable.
When the sobbing stopped-and it lasted for only a short time-I had a sense of apprehension I couldn't get rid of. Either I was getting sensitive to the scent or it was getting stronger, but I couldn't ignore it. And I lay silently, my fists clenched and my breathing hushed, for what seemed an eternity.
Some muffled sound floating in through my window brought me upright, the hair on the back of my neck prickling and goose bumps covering my skin. With an awful sense of dread I arose and tiptoed to the window. Near the far end of Maria's long cactus garden, in the direction of the old de Vasca crypt, there was a faint light. It moved slowly and hesitantly, floating toward the house as if somebody were coming along one of the uneven paths. And as it approached, I thought I could make out the hint of a figure behind it.
Without a moon, there was no hope of seeing very much. But I convinced myself I was looking at a lantern, hooded to deflect its feeble rays away from whoever carried it. And it was impossible not to yield to the idea it was suspended from the hand of a robed woman.
As the light neared the house I realized the sitting room window would afford me a better view. I rushed to it, fearful of getting there too late to see where the strange figure went, but I was in time. To my utter disbelief, she-if it really was a woman or a woman's ghost-seemed to walk directly to the library wall and disappear! I dropped to my knees and lay on the low sill, my head and shoulders hanging outside while ' I satisfied myself that the apparition wasn't simply creeping along next to the wall. But there could be no doubt; "she" had vanished-vanished into the library wall!
The fragrance was still all around me. It even hovered around me where I hung outside the window. And I stayed there for a time, gasping while all the superstitious terrors out of a child's nightmare washed over me. There was a ghost! Lolita had hounded Jennifer to death for stealing Juan. And Maria, who "took after Lolita more than she did her own mother" was in love with John! Lolita, Maria's spirit-mother, knew how I loved John, myself, and after these many years of rest was coming back to haunt the Casa until I gave up!
I couldn't bring myself to face the sitting room; there had to be a ghost in it. But inch by desperate inch, I drew back through the window and forced myself erect. And when I turned, the room was empty. The best I could do, though, was to press my back against the edge of the window niche. The fragrance was all too evident for me to feel alone.
And at a moment when I was certain the scent had thickened perceptibly, I heard a single muffled thump that seemed to come from the wall that separated the sitting room from Rolf's bedroom. I had to stifle a scream. With the interior walls as thick as the exterior-and constructed of the same sound-deadening adobe-it was inconceivable Rolf could have made such a noise in his sleep. He might have made it by smashing a chair against the wall, but even that seemed doubtful. Still, I'd heard the thump! And I cowered, hoping the ghost would go away.
The door to the hall burst open and Rolf appeared, his eyes wide and startled-looking. "Mom?" he called without looking in my direction.
"Rolf! Oh, Rolf, thank God you're here!"
He tensed, cords leaping into prominence in his neck and his face turning pale. Very slowly, he turned his head, his stare sliding from my dark bedroom doorway to the window where I stood. When he saw me his mouth dropped open and he gasped violently. His gaze traveled over me while an expression of incredulity spread across his face.
Only then did I remember I was naked. My hands fluttered as if to snatch at something to cover my body with, but I stilled them. My terror had dissolved; there was no ghost that could hold a threat either for Rolf or me when we were together. And Rolf had seen-in that matter of seconds-everything there was of me to see.
With deliberate calm, I moved away from the window to the center of the room. "How did you get here just at the right time, hon?" I asked.
"Right time?"
"Honey, I was scared to death! The last thing was a thump from the wall! I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't come in!"
"I heard it, too! The thump. Mom, I was afraid something had happened to you!" He looked worried for a moment as if the memory of his concern had returned. But his face cleared and he grinned shyly. "I can see nothing did."
"Huh?"
"Nothing wrong with that, Mom! "And he ran his gaze slowly over me again, making no effort to hide his fascination.
CHAPTER FOUR
One of the hardest things in the world to do is hold still when you're nervous. I thought I knew at that moment how a fawn must feel with a predator just across the clearing. The impulse to bolt is all but overpowering and every fiber quivers with the effort to resist the impulse. Standing quietly under my son's scrutiny was bad enough. But holding my hands at my sides, motionless, was sheer torture.
I wanted to speak-to break the deepening silence-but my throat was too tight and I didn't know what to say. There was too much hazard either of being flip, which would have been grossly inappropriate, or brassy. And I wasn't going to let Rolf get the idea I was hard; the events that were so likely to grow out of the situation were going to come too close to creating that impression, as it was.
He blurted out. "You are different! You couldn't feel the same!" He gasped and swallowed, his sudden confusion suggesting he wished he could swallow the comment.
"The same?" I repeated softly.
"She-" He choked on whatever he'd meant to say.
"Rose, honey?"
The confusion and uncertainty drained from him and he calmed. His eyes were abruptly clear and steady and he returned my gaze without flinching. "Yeah. I spent a long time in her studio this afternoon."
"Talk a lot?"
A fleeting grin touched his lips. "Yeah. And did a lot of 'not-talking'. She-well, she said women mostly felt the same when-when it mattered."
I knew what she'd said. I wanted to evade a decision on whether to let him find that out so early. But I was certain now that a time was going to come when I'd engulf his newly-christened cock.
"Come here, Rolf." I kept my voice matter-of-fact.
He approached without taking his gaze from my eyes.
"Feel me. Just run your hands over me and find out." And when he gulped and hesitated, I smiled. "You know what Rose feels like, don't you?"
"Yeah."
He felt my arms, his hands feeling awkward to me as they ran over my flesh. I smiled again, meeting his questioning, half-scared glance squarely, and raised my arms to clasp my hands at the back of my head, my elbows drawn back and out to the sides. I knew what the posture was doing to my figure. I knew my boobies, full and firm anyhow, were lifted and tilted by the new tautness. I knew my belly was sinking back and letting the mound under my pubic hair protrude suggestively. But I knew he'd understand I wasn't asking him to form a judgment based on how my arms felt.
He laid each hand at one of my elbows and ran his fingers lightly inward along my upper arms to my armpits. I could hardly believe that kind of caress on that part of my body could arouse such a storm of sensation! My boobies seemed to writhe within and my nipples tingled as if they were connected to buzzers! My belly churned and a flash of heat in my pussy made my thighs tense! I gasped and then couldn't breathe!
But I was alert. Through the wall of excitement I sensed the secondary movements of his fingertips as he tested the firm fullness of my flesh. And I could easily imagine the mental comparison he was making between Rose and me. She'd kept herself almost thin-part of the poetic image, I supposed. If I'd disliked her just a little more I'd have thought of her as stringy, but she missed that by a little bit. Still, her upper arms didn't have enough meat on them to pad the bone. And Rolf was feeling another kind of flesh now.
With the heels of his hands at the sides and his fingertips curling around to the back, he stroked slowly over my ribs to my waist. He held them there for a time, closing them on the firm muscles.
"There's a lot of difference," he commented simply. "An awful lot."
But we both knew he wasn't testing what Rose had really said. And I wasn't ready yet to predict when we would.
He moved around to my right side. "May I?"
"Yes."
The sensations crowded over each other then. His left hand explored my back while his right played over my belly. In the midst of the chaotic jumble of alarms his touch generated in me, I let myself visualize the scene. Rolf always slept in his Jockey shorts and that was the way he'd come into the sitting room. He was better developed than most fifteen-year-olds, with the angular gawkiness gone and replaced by hard, tapered lines. With broad shoulders and a thick chest, he looked like a wedge. Narrow waisted, slim hipped and sturdily supported by legs that boasted bulging thighs and calves. But it was still a boy's body in its hairless smoothness and youthful, flawless skin. Only the great lump where his hard-on tented his shorts looked all man.
And he was big! His five-ten, hundred-sixty-pound frame was a sharp contrast to my five-one, one-fifteen. I had no sense of embarrassment over my part in the picture, though. A thirty-five, twenty-two, thirty-three figure didn't require apology when it was firm and wrinkle-free and elastic at my age. And a honey-blonde who can substantiate the color of her hair even when she's naked doesn't cringe from a man's stare. I stood casually, now, committed and therefore free of the nervous paralysis I'd suffered from, with my weight on one foot and the other knee relaxed and bent modestly, one hip thrust toward my son and my upper torso leaned a little. My only real difficulty was maintaining the posture with lances of excitement searing me.
Rolf felt of my belly and fingered the abrupt slope where my skin flared to cover my lower ribs. And I tensed inwardly as his fingers approached the under-bulge of my breasts. At the moment he cupped his palm under my breast, his other hand cupped intimately over one of my buttocks. I drew a long, shuddering breath and surrendered to the surge of pleasure. My shoulders twisted involuntarily and my ass cheeks tightened. Rolf explored my boob with thorough squeezing and prodding and gentle rubbing. When his thumb and fingers closed on my nipple, I grunted explosively and felt my belly leap. My arms tensed and jerked forward, pulling at my head, and I dug my chin into the hollow where my collar bones met.
"Oh, dear!" I exclaimed in a whisper. "It's so hard to hold still!"
"Gosh, Mom! Gosh, what breasts!"
"Unh! Do-you always-call them-breasts-son?" I couldn't overcome the jerky cadence.
He appeared to squirm. "Well-knockers, maybe-tits-lots of things. Anyhow, you've got Class A knockers, Mom! Man, do they feel great in a guy's hand!"
What the hell do you say to that? For the life of me, I don't know! And the way I felt right then, nothing brilliant came to mind. So I just moaned a little and twisted my shoulders again. Rolf edged around to stand behind me, both hands reaching around so he could hold one "knocker" in each. I leaned against him, the contact with his flesh flooding me with a new, fierce tide of desire. He massaged my boobs vigorously, kneading their hot masses and teasing my nipples. The pink lumps grew and hardened and the dark aureoles around them swelled and darkened as well.
My awareness of the body I leaned against grew more intense. His thighs felt hard and hot where my buttocks squirmed on them. The thick cylinder of his hard-on was like an unyielding column at the small of my back. And his chest was a broad, firm wall for my back and shoulders to rub against. I wanted firercely to tell him to take off his shorts. Something primitive and earthy in me ached for the sensation of that eager cock against my flesh without intervening material. And he might as well have been listening to my thoughts.
"Mom?"
"Hmm?"
"Mom-would you-I mean, you think-well, is it okay if I take off my shorts? I could feel you better that way."
Perversely, I couldn't bring myself to tell him it was okay. The best I could do was shrug. But he backed away from me and I sighed tremulously and tried to collect my composure. Letting him get rid of the shorts was a long step toward tacit permission to fuck me, I realized. And every step was going to make a refusal that much more difficult.
But when he bellied against me and seized my tits again, the rush of fiery pleasure drowned any reservation I still held. Hairless as the rest of his body was, he had a thick, wiry brush of pubic hair. And it bristled against my back to frame the moist heat of his cock. I hadn't thought of the sensation I'd experience when those youthful nuggets in his scrotum rested on my ass, either, and I'd begun to squirm under their touch before I knew my hips were moving.
He played more urgently with my boobies. His fingers worried my nipples and shot savage pulses of delight through me. And his hands shaped and reshaped the mounded flesh behind the nipples. I unclasped my hands and brought my arms down, reaching back to clutch at his sides. I could feel the intermittent pressure as he alternately thrust his hips forward to crush his cock between us and jerked them back to relieve the pressure. And my buttocks squirmed unceasingly.
With his left arm, he reached across me and grabbed my right breast. His right hand, freed, slipped onto my belly again and started fondling the trembling flesh with demanding, eager caresses. I let my breath hiss softly as his fingers worked their way into my pubic hair and downward toward the lower bulge of my mound. And without bothering to weigh the significance of my gesture, I slid my feet apart and spread my thighs while his hand plunged into the space under my crotch.
His fingers lingered on the outer slopes of my pussy lips. They dragged across the sparse pussy hair and tugged at the sensitized skin and my hips jerked uncontrollably. A nagging awareness somewhere in my mental jumble kept trying to remind me this wasn't the kind of feeling I'd invited him to do, but my excitement was far too intense to tolerate such a petty distinction, deception that it had been. The time had passed for playing evasive games; sex filled my emotions and twisted my body, and nothing else mattered except that this was the boy I'd poured my love onto for fifteen long years.
He slid one fingertip along the parted edges of my slit, unhampered by pussy hair and coated with the thickening wetness that clung to the quivering membranes in layers. I ground myself on his body and bent both knees, sagging onto the impudent finger. He stroked persistently, his fingers plunging between the swollen tissues and inflaming them with delight. My hips moved continuously, rotating in hard, erratic jerks.
Beside myself now with desire, I grabbed his hand and guided his fingers to my clitoris. He felt of it and grunted his surprise.
"Hey! What's that!"
I told him, and he rolled it gently between his fingers to get the feel.
"It's like a little penis!" he exclaimed.
I gasped. "With a hard-on!"
"Yeah!" He rubbed the tip with a slow, circular motion and I went wild.
"Oh, God! Rolf!" I had to stop him for an instant.
I clutched at his wrist with both hands and dragged his fingers away from the throbbing lump. He waited patiently until I let go, then began a light stroking along the side of the clitoris shaft. I groaned and writhed, desperately struggling to keep my hands out of the way while my body jerked from side to side.
"My gosh, Mom!" He sounded shaken. "That really drives you up the wall, doesn't it?"
"Honey, honey! Oh, God, honey! I'm sorry to be such an animal! I just can't help it!"
"Oh, man!" There was awe in his voice and a note of something else. He was aware, suddenly, of the power he had over me. The wild thrashing his caresses produced was so obviously involuntary he couldn't help realizing I'd revealed the secret of overcoming conscious determination.
As the pressure of the massage increased, the intensity of the pleasure it caused grew greater than I could stand. In spite of my best efforts, I had to grab his hand and stop the fierce influx of sensation. He resisted briefly, then let me pull his hand away. But the pressure of his cock in the middle of my back increased and his other arm held me tightly to him.
"No fair!" he protested.
"I-can't help it!" I gasped. "Oh, God, honey! I don't want to make you stop, but I can't help it!" A weird notion flitted across my thoughts. "Maybe you ought to tie my hands behind me."
"You serious, Mom?" He laughed explosively, as if to relieve the shock the suggestion had produced.
"I wasn't, but maybe you ought to."
"Well...." He seemed to hesitate. "What with?"
"I-I've got some nylons with runs starting in them. I haven't thrown them out yet. Maybe-"
"Where? I'll get them."
"On top of the big chest."
I trembled when he left me. The lights went on in the bedroom and I heard Rolf knock something over on the top of the dresser. But he returned in a moment, the discarded nylons dangling from his hand.
Instead of tying my hands behind me, he lashed them together in front.
"That won't keep them out of the way," I said.
"I figured a way." He grinned and tied the end of another stocking to the free end of the one he'd already used. And reaching up to the overhead lamp, he passed the end of the stocking through a link of the supporting chain.
Quickly, he raised my arms over my head, snugged the stocking and knotted it.
"But I'll pull the whole thing down!" I protested.
"Mom, you could swing on that thing! It's as solid as the beams in the ceiling." He grinned more broadly. "I already know that; it's just like the one in my room."
I cautiously tested his assertion. He was right; it bore my weight without a creak. But I felt a rush of self-consciousness I hadn't had before. Having my arms stretched above me that way somehow made me feel incredibly more naked and exposed!
Rolf didn't give me time to think about it. He fingered me and pressed against my back and grabbed my pussy. I spread my legs for him, resigning myself to the novel situation and bracing inwardly against the explosion of sensations I knew his probing would bring.
He wasted no time, but began at once to massage my clitoris. I twisted and jerked, fantastic jolts of excitement wrenching me backward and forward. And when I couldn't tolerate the fierce stimulation I crossed one leg over the other and clamped my thighs, thrusting back with my ass and panting heavily.
Rolf laughed with childish delight. "I knew you'd do that!" he exclaimed gleefully.
Without any pretense of asking permission, he knelt and tied a stocking to each of my ankles. He pulled the couch into position and moved the armchair, then used them to secure the ends of the stockings, fastening my legs apart at a grotesque angle. I was humiliated and indignant at the position he'd put me in.
"Rolf! For God's sake! What are you doing? You must be out of your mind!"
"You said you didn't really want to stop me, Mom." He didn't sound concerned over my protest
"But this! You can't do this, son! Good God!"
He laughed and straddled one of my outstretched thighs. His hand dug into my pussy and his thumb went to my clitoris. "I guess I can't. But I did."
If I'd wanted to make an issue of it, the time had passed. I could do nothing but react. My body lashed fiercely backward and forward, my hips snapping powerfully as the sensations of pleasure in my pussy soared beyond anything I could ever have withstood of my own free will. I cried and moaned and gritted my teeth. Rolf bent to grab one of my tits in his mouth, and he sucked savagely while his hands continued to maul my pussy. His thumb stayed on my clitoris, rolling it and rubbing it while his fingers stabbed into my cunt again and again.
Lust half-blinded me and every shred of reserve evaporated. I flung my pussy against his hands like a rutting sow. Words tumbled unheeded from my pouting lips and I ground my teeth together with desperate bites. I alternated between rising to the balls of my widespread feet and hanging by my wrists, and my shoulders twisted furiously.
I begged him to fuck me, but he was drunk with his power and hypnotized by the violence of my reaction. I vaguely sensed the fact his fingers were still exploring, and I felt the wetness as he smeared my copious pussy juice over all the flesh around my cunt. I was startled briefly when he drove a finger into my ass, but the resulting wave of pleasure stifled my protest and made me cry out with joy.
I don't have any idea how many fingers he used, but he seemed to fill both my cunt and my anus with them, his thumb never slowing in its terrible assault on my clitoris. My excitement multiplied to such intensities I completely lost control of myself. I frothed at the mouth and the foamy saliva drooled onto my chest and coated my leaping boobs. My pulse raced and I panted violently from my exertions.
And suddenly I was coming! "Rolf! OMIGOD, HONEY, I'M-I'M-COMINNNGGG! EEEEE!"
I went rigid, tremors shaking me and spasms convulsing my guts. At the height of the inner contractions, the sensation in my clitoris became totally intolerable.
I screamed at him. "NO! NO! OH, JESUS, STOP! I CAN'T STAND IT ANY MORE!"
He pulled his hands away and stepped back, staring at me while I continued to twist in the grip of my orgasm. And when the savage convulsions subsided and I sagged, he whistled softly.
"Whew! Jeez, Mom! You come like something else!"
"Oh, God!" I whispered, exhausted. "Like a girl who's never reached a climax before!"
I realized what a contrast there was between my deepening lassitude and my son's continuing tautness. He had yet to find relief from the excitement that must be devouring him! And watching my lewd figure couldn't do anything for him but heighten his lust.
I tried to give a light laugh, croaking instead. "Bonus, honey."
"Huh?"
"I got a bonus. That was an unscheduled orgasm."
"Oh."
"It's my turn to help you."
"I don't-"
"Oh, good God, honey, I'm not suggesting turning the thing around! But there's a big step we haven't taken!"
"Like...."
"Yes. Now, get me down from here."
He untied me quickly. My hands burned while their circulation was coming back, but I ignored the agony and flung myself against my uncertain boy. I pulled his face down to mine and gulped at his mouth, greedy for a kind of kiss we'd never shared. His hunger seemed to eclipse his reawakened self-consciousness and he grabbed me in his arms, crushing me to him while his mouth savaged mine. I ground my belly on his cock and my boobs on his chest, my excitement bursting within me again. And by the hard, irregular jumps in the hot cylinder, I knew he'd come perilously close to the limit of his self-control.
I pulled my mouth away from his. "Honey?"
"Yeah?" he panted.
"Honey, fuck me now!"
"Mom! You want me to, Mom?"
"NOW, SON! GOD, YES! FUCK ME!"
As if I'd turned a key in some hidden lock, he became a wild, primitive creature. He flung me onto the couch, pulled my knees apart and dropped between my thighs. I pulled my knees up, wide-spread, and he caught them and forced them over me, bearing down until they pressed the sides of my rib cage. His cockhead touched my gaping cunt and paused for an instant. Then, with a brutal lunge, he plunged it into me and blasted his pelvic bone onto my pussy.
I shrieked, panicked by the terrible ferocity of his thrust and hysterical with joy at the depth of his penetration. "JESUS! YES, HON! HARD-HARD!"
His hips jerked viciously. He blasted me again and again, my whole body leaping under the savage pounding. And his cockhead churned my guts as it pistoned the length of my vagina. His arms encircled me, trapping my thighs along my sides, and I flopped like a rag doll to his fucking. My passion surged wildly. I soared with it toward an infinitely richer climax than my first, and when his fierce pumping gave way to a quivering, motionless thrust that held us welded together, my vagina milked the dear cock mercilessly. The base of his cock jerked and heat pooled in my belly. I cried while my son grunted, and I felt my nails sink into the skin of his back.
"Oh, yes, honey!" I whispered urgently. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
He groaned as if somebody were twisting a knife in his gut. We strained and sweated and clung to each other. And at last our rigidity melted and our tremors subsided. His clutching arms eased their fierce grip and I felt my legs released. I closed them around his waist and held him to me, cradling him with an intimacy we'd never before known with each other. And happiness richer than any I'd ever experienced seeped through me and warmed me.
"Thank you, son," I whispered. "Oooh, this is so gooood!"
"Mmm! Mom, it's better than good!" He shivered. "Know what?"
"What?"
"Cunt isn't all alike. Yours grabbed my whole pecker, from one end to the other! Rose's didn't." I giggled. "You going to tell her?"
"Better not. Might make her feel bad."
CHAPTER FIVE
After a long, comfortable silence, punctuated by brief flurries of amusement as one or the other of us stirred, Rolf propped himself on one elbow and looked curiously into my eyes.
"Mom? What was that noise I came in here to find out about?"
"I don't know. I wish you hadn't remembered."
"How come?"
I told him about the sobbing and the light in the garden and the scent. We both sniffed the air, but the only odor apart from that characteristic of the room was one of sweat and sex. Rolf studied me quizzically as if half-convinced I was fabricating the whole thing.
"Weren't walking in your sleep, were you?" he asked.
Just like John, I thought. Damn skeptics, both of them! And I told him the ghost legend Maria had told me.
He chuckled with a superior air. "Can't believe that stuff. Ghosts, for gosh sake!"
"Sure. What about that thump? Any idea what it might have been?"
He paused before replying. "No. I guess not. But it was a real thump, not a ghost noise."
"Where did it come from?"
To him, it had sounded like something in my sitting room. It had sounded like a noise coming through the wall, as it had to me. Only he'd been on one side of the wall and I'd been on the other.
And that left only the wall, itself. Or some failure of our directional sense. Rolf was far less concerned by the puzzle than I. He seemed satisfied to accept the idea a noise in the roof or downstairs could have given us the wrong notion of direction.
"Anyhow, who cares?" he asked. "What's a thump or two when a guy gets what I did because of it?"
And when he'd spent a time mulling over that bit of wisdom, he changed the subject. "Funny, Rose was maybe right in the first place."
"About what?"
"You. Said you'd probably dig it if I just threw you on the ground and started ripping off your clothes. In a way that's like you telling me to tie your hands behind you."
"Yes. I'd come closer to turning on that way than if you beat around the bush for an hour."
"She didn't trust her judgment, though. Said forget it; be subtle and take it easy."
I felt a little of my earlier resentment at the woman returning. "She's got an uncanny kind of insight, hon. Maybe that's why her poetry's so powerful. But she doesn't trust it in real life."
"Too bad. She sure below it on that guess."
"And she was so right!" I shook my head. "It isn't that I'd get all excited about being thrown on the ground, you understand. It's just that it nauseates me to see the kind of coy games that get played when two people want to go to bed with each other. It's an insult to a woman's maturity for a man to try to talk her into letting him fuck her without her knowing what's going on."
"You sound like women's lib, Mom."
"It's that kind of farce that makes women think they've got to go that route! A lot of them don't think they can ever convince men they're mature human beings any other way!" I simmered, still irritated at Rose because she hadn't the guts to trust her insight. "I'd rather wake up to find you had me tied spread-eagle on the bed and were raping me than to have you pussyfoot around trying to get into me without my tumbling to what you were doing."
He laughed and shivered. "If I thought you'd sleep until I got you tied, I'd try that!" he exclaimed. "Be fun!" There was a wistful note in his voice and I knew he was slipping into fantasy.
I stirred. "There isn't much night left, hon. You'd better get back to bed." And seeing the expression in his face, I added, "Your own bed, that is."
"Okay. If you say so." Reluctantly, he withdrew his hardening cock out of me and stumbled to his feet. Recovering his shorts, he left me alone.
When I unlocked the library after breakfast a breath of the desert breeze brushed my face. I stopped in my tracks, standing motionless in the arcade before entering. And as the "wrongness" of the breeze penetrated, I stayed outside the door. Fortunately, John was already visible at the other side of the court.
I called to him. "John? John, something's wrong here. I don't want to go in until you get here."
He crossed quickly. "Problem, baby?"
"Something's open. I felt a draft when I opened the door."
He pushed past me. "Hell, the garden window's open! Look at that drape blow!"
I caught a momentary whiff of the strange fragrance I was getting to know so well. Then it was gone.
"Hey!" John yelled. "Look here!" He bent over the case the lantern belonged in.
I ran to his side and stared down at the sturdy little lantern. "John, it's smoky!"
He picked it up and examined it. "Damned if it isn't! Bet this is the first time it's had a flame in it for thirty years!"
After he'd finished examining it and speculating over what had happened to it, he handed it to me. "No use letting that smoke stay on it. Works its way into the horn."
I wiped it thoroughly. It was a fine piece of craftsmanship. The frame was brass and the windows were horn, scraped thin enough to be translucent. And the back was screened to keep the light out of the user's eyes. It wasn't remarkable, really; I'd seen lanterns that were better crafted. But I'd never seen another so small-designed for a stub of a candle and capable of being carried with so little effort.
I was convinced of one thing; it was this lantern I'd seen in the garden. It wasn't that I could have seen enough detail to be that sure, but that light had been a glow rather than a flame or the glitter of an electric bulb-and this lantern had been used. Since nobody seemed inclined to believe my accounts of strange occurrences anyhow, I didn't have to look for firm proof. I knew what I knew.
I didn't discuss the night's episode with John. But while he was puzzling over the open window and asserting over and over that he'd watched me lock it and then checked it, himself-and that it couldn't be unlocked from the outside-I was remembering it was right here that the mysterious figure with the lantern had vanished.
The day was quiet. We worked at the normal hectic pace and made the normal amount of progress on John's manuscript. And when we quit at three o'clock for the day, Rolf met me in the arcade and went with me to my sitting room for our usual talk.
I'd come to treasure those talks. In Cleveland there had been a growing barrier between us. The concepts of his schoolmates and neighborhood acquaintances had turned him against such communication; adults were "the enemy" and had to be treated with wary aloofness. Here at Casa del Gato negative influences from outside seemed to be nonexistent. Rolf not only had recaptured his little-boy willingness to share ideas and experiences with me; he seemed to store them for the sharing.
On this day, I sensed an awkwardness. We didn't have a barrier, but Rolf appeared to be on guard against going too far. He gulped from time to time, too, and eyed me speculatively when he thought my attention was somewhere else. I decided we had to defuse the issue of the previous night's experience.
"See Rose today?" I asked.
He nodded, then looked into my eyes. "Screwed her again, Mom. Sort of took her by surprise with that clitoris thing. She just about went ape!"
"It certainly couldn't have been new to her. She's not that pure."
He grinned. "Naw. She just didn't expect it from me. And I sort of had her pinned before I started. She couldn't stop me. Boy, did she go to pieces!" In the recollection, his eyes widened and his voice shook. "Honest! I thought she was going to break herself in two!"
"But she didn't."
"Naw."
I'd gotten him loosened up. He'd been put on notice we could talk about sex without evasiveness.
He swallowed. "Mom? Feel like screwing before supper?"
I did. My pussy was writhing with desire for his hard young cock. But he could easily grow to expect an open season on me and I didn't feel that was wise.
I shook my head. "It would be fun, honey. But we're not going to get into that kind of habit. If you made out with Rose you've had enough for today."
"For the whole day?" He sounded incredulous. "Aw, Mom!"
"Sorry. By the way, what did Rose have to say about the fact you got to me so fast?"
"Huh? MOM! I didn't tell her that!"
"And she didn't ask?"
"No."
"That business with the clitoris. Suppose she wondered how you found out about it so soon? I mean, she hadn't shown you, had she?"
"Omigosh! I don't know what she thought! She didn't say anything, though, except how it made her feel." He apparently remembered something he'd forgotten to mention. "Hey! I watched Blaine with his rattlesnakes this morning! He had a new one and I got to watch him taking the fangs out!"
"That seems too cruel to me."
"Not the way he does it." He defended Blaine. "He really is an expert! And that was really a big one, too! Biggest in the compound now!"
"Was Maria there?"
"Sure!" He grinned. "I think she worships snakes. Pretends she's still Indian. She held him for Blaine." Then he shook his head. "She's funny, Mom. Friendly and all, but sort of distant." He sighed.
I knew what he felt for the beautiful, dark girl. The four years that separated them in age had turned her into a woman. A man would have had to be blind or homosexual to escape the excitement her figure and carriage generated. Inexperienced and impressionable, Rolf could no more have escaped her magic than fly. And her charms had nothing of the ascetic in them; she had an earthy, robust look of aliveness about her. I suspected that Rolf must develop a hard-on every time he got near her.
"She wouldn't be as easy as Rose?" I asked with a smile.
"Gosh! Mom, when she does decide to put out, it's going to mean something! It's not going to be a 'poetic exercise' the way Rose lets on it is with her."
As I formed a picture of the sex consciousness my son had developed-of the way he looked at the subject and reacted to it-I found my own resolve weakening. If I couldn't find the brakes for my runaway hunger I'd be letting him make love to me before supper after all! I uncurled from my position at the end of the couch and stood.
"Had Rose done any more composing today?" I asked.
"I think so." Rolf grinned smugly. "Said something about my screwing up the mood again."
"I'd better find out if she wants me to do up the typing. I didn't do any last night."
"Aw, gee, Mom!"
But I insisted and our private session came to an end. The Casa was really a quadrangle-four wings built around a central courtyard-with the halls being arcades running around the inside. And Rose's study was diagonally across the courtyard from my suite. I passed Maria's apartment on my way to Rose's corner. The massive door stood open and Maria was on her way out. Surprise flashed briefly in her eyes and then something that made me gasp with its virulence. But before I could react her features had smoothed and she smiled blandly.
"Hear any more of the ghost?" she asked.
"Yes. A little, last night. Someone was down in the garden at about two-thirty in the morning, too. Must have had a key to the library. Left one of the windows open."
"Oh, no, Anne! You've got the only other key to that door. John thinks it's simpler if he and his secretary have the only ones."
"But he admits it doesn't really matter who goes in there!"
"Habit. He's right. He's got too much on his mind to have to think about things like locking up. Duane-Duane Worden, the secretary he had before you-Duane made him do it that way. And it worked the last time John had to go somewhere for atmosphere."
I was almost sure I'd caught a tender wistfulness in her tone when she'd mentioned Duane. But she didn't give me a chance to probe.
"Maybe that was the ghost in the garden," she remarked. "Lolita used to do that, they say."
"Are there any secret passages in the house, Maria? Like hidden stairs or anything?"
She shrugged. "Nobody knows. There's stories about the Casa that hint at some, but we've never seen them."
We reached the head of the main stairway and Maria started down. I went past, toward Rose's study. Rose was there, gazing thoughtfully out the west window. She heard me when I went through the arch, for she turned and peered at me.
"Anne! Come on in! I just love the way the country changes colors at this time of day." And she returned to her contemplation of the desert.
I joined her. The harsh brilliance of midday had given way to soft grays and silvers. The natural growth looked like faint smudges of smoke and the tops of the low ridges gleamed with gold tints. It didn't take a poetic nature to make a person feel shivery at the sight. I sighed happily.
"God, I love it here, Rose! It's just fantastic!"
She chuckled softly. "I'm glad you're here, Anne. The Casa feels alive." She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. "I like having that boy of yours here, too. It's good to feel the vibrations of a life that's just opening up."
"Poetic exercise?"
"Good excuse." She giggled. "Those vibes of his get pretty deep into a lady poet. He's the kind who makes a woman glad she is, isn't he?"
"You made quite an impression on him with your advice," I replied dryly.
She faced me frankly. "It would have been a crime for two people as sexy as you and Rolf not ever to try each other." And she smiled. "Wouldn't it?"
"Yes." There was no need to deny it. "What about Rolf and Maria? Talk about sexy!"
"When she's ready...." She paused reflectively. "She's a funny person, Anne. Possessive as hell!"
"And living in the past."
"That's what's funny about her. She's got that thing about the past and yet there's a part of her that's way out ahead of the world." She shrugged. "When she's ready she's going to share John with me. She loves him. I think she's a little afraid of the way you love him, Anne."
I gasped. The way she said it made it sound so normal and right; there wasn't a hint of jealousy, either about Maria or me!
She continued, half-laughing. "Wouldn't put it past her to pull a Lolita on you."
"Rose! Would she?"
She laughed again, quickly. "Oh, no. I shouldn't say a thing like that. I overreact to people, Anne. It's just the feeling she gives. But she wouldn't do a thing like that. Rattlesnakes are so bothersome."
I was relieved at her immediate denial. Being haunted was one thing. Having Maria deliberately attempt that kind of deadly action would have been another. Rose gave me the stanzas she'd completed and I took them back to my sitting room. After supper I'd put them into her manuscript format.
As it turned out, it was quite late before I got to them. The after-dinner drinks in the living room turned into more drinking than I'd seen them do at the Casa. Rolf excused himself early and went to his room and when the talk got around to sex and an undercurrent of personalities that began to expose the intimacy I knew lay between John and Kim, as well as that between Rose and Blaine, Maria left. It dawned on me finally that there was going to be something more than talk before the two couples left the living room and I beat a retreat at a point where it had become apparent I might be the target for the night.
I wouldn't have moved-I'd have waited eagerly-if it hadn't been for Blaine. But the way he eyed me made cold chills run up and down my spine and I couldn't face the thought of making love in front of him. Or with him!
It was past midnight before I got my typewriter into operation. Margarita, the cat, lay curled in feline majesty on the rug in front of the cold fireplace. Rolf was asleep-I'd checked cautiously when I'd come upstairs. And I supposed Maria must also be sleeping. Her door was open and her apartment was dark.
Halfway through the second page of typing I stiffened. My fingers lay motionless on the keyboard and the paper blurred in my vision. The ghostly fragrance was all about me, stealing in and out of my consciousness. I" held my breath and listened.
The house was silent and the only sound from outside was the distant wail of a coyote. Imagination and nerves were getting to me, I decided. But I felt a chill and the back of my neck prickled. With that childish terror of the previous night welling in my throat I forced myself to turn in my chair. Margarita had risen to her feet. She stood with her hair stiff and bristling and her tail straight in the air. Her back was arched and her side was toward the center of the room, which she stared at with narrowed eyes. Her ears lay close to her head. From her open mouth came a low, defiant squall. While I watched her, horribly frightened by her agitation and the fact she seemed to be staring at thin air, she spit loudly, emitted a chilling yowl and leaped wildly past the couch and out of the room. I heard one more angry squall as she fled along the arcade and the scrambling of her claws on the flagstones. Then I was alone.
But the scent had grown more pronounced. A faint, metallic rustling caught my attention. I concentrated on it, trying desperately to identify it. Metal rustling over metal, I thought, and a soft "clink" punctuated it. My body was bathed with perspiration but I shivered with a violent chill. Somebody was walking! There was a step, a dragging sound, another step, another dragging. It was someone who had to drag one foot, I told myself hysterically. Someone with a bad leg. And the metallic rustle was a chain wound twice around a slim waist-and there had to be a golden key hanging from the chain and clinking against a loose link!
I knew nobody was in the arcade, though. The sounds weren't coming to me through the door. They were, somehow, right there in the sitting room with me! Everything but the desk looked menacing. The couch, angled across one corner so it faced the fireplace, was hiding demons in the dark behind it. The armchair, crouching at the other end of the far wall, threatened me dourly.
The dragging footsteps faded and I couldn't hear the rustle of the chain. I trembled, clinging to the seat of my chair and jerking my glance from one shadow to another with my head rigidly held in one position. I was hovering on the edge of sheer panic and the strange scent was getting no weaker. For a long time I heard nothing but the lonely coyote and then the dismal sobbing began.
I shuddered and my shoulders drooped. Of all the evidences of the ghost, this one moved me the most and frightened me the least. Somehow it wasn't possible to believe the sobs could be disembodied; they had to be coming from a troubled human throat. But they had another, eerie quality about them tonight and the sadness they brought me was tinged with an unaccountable sense of loss.
There was a sudden, startled sounding, breathy wail-low and querulous-from the window, followed by a muffled clapping and a weird whistle. My nerves broke. With a wild leap, I overturned my chair, sprawled over it and scrambled on all fours toward the door.
I wept with terror. "You stupid goddamn broad!" I hissed at myself. "Should have taken off with the cat, for Christ's sake!"
I sprawled again, bringing up in a heap at the rail overlooking the inner courtyard, and dragged myself to my feet. My knees threatened to dump me on my face, but I got them under a doubtful sort of control and clawed my way along the rail away from the horror of my sitting room. I threw a fearful glance backward and saw nothing, then hurried my steps and ran toward the stairway.
A shadow detached itself from one of the inner columns arid moved toward me. My throat swelling with a strangled scream, I stopped in my tracks and pressed against the rail. As the shadow came closer, making no sound and seeming to float along the flagstones, my accumulated fright burst from me in a wild shriek.
And even as the shriek reverberated in the courtyard, the shadow turned into John, his arms out to me and his voice soft and coaxing.
"Anne! Anne! There, there, Anne! It's okay! Everything's all right!"
I flung myself into his arms and sobbed on his chest. My legs collapsed and he swept me off my feet, cuddling me like a helpless child.
"It's okay, baby! It's okay-easy, sweet-take it easy."
CHAPTER SIX
John immediately noticed the work at my typewriter. He shook his head with an exasperated grin.
"Glutton for punishment," he remarked. "Thought we were going to have a moratorium on overtime for a while."
"I'm not having a breakdown," I said. "Good heavens, John! There's not that much work going on here!"
"Oh, come on! We're working like hell!"
"You people are; you're doing the creating. But it's not that big a strain for me. Big difference there."
"Hmph."
He hadn't put me down yet and I hoped he wouldn't think of it too soon. He peered around the room, then looked quizzically into my face. "Now. What's all the fuss about? Nightmare? Doze off at the desk and wake up to find the typewriter getting ready to gobble you up?"
"That's not fair!" I protested, then described the way the cat had acted. He wasn't likely to attribute that to my nerves. And without mentioning the footsteps or the chain or the scent I told him about the racket at the window.
He didn't say anything about the cat's behavior, but he did carry me to the window, which was open to the night. And with a gentle chuckle he set me on my feet and bent to pick something up from the floor beneath the window sill. He held it up-a long, gray-brown feather. I stared blankly at it for a moment, then gasped and began to laugh. "Owl?" I asked.
"Looks like." He slipped one arm around my waist and hugged me. "Now that's legitimate grounds for going to pieces! No, I mean it! Baby, as long as I've lived out here on the desert, I still get the hell scared out of me once in a while by a damned owl!" He turned the feather in his fingers, studying it thoughtfully.
"Making a collection?" I asked. "Why keep that?"
Still holding me in the angle of one arm, he placed the tip of the feather to my jaw and drew it across the skin. I was amazed at his control; the touch was so light I couldn't be sure whether the contact was continuous, and remarkable tingling sensations raced over me. No doubt the effect was aggravated by the intensity of emotion I held for him, but the gentle tickling aroused a whirlwind of erotic response in me. I gasped and tensed and my thighs clamped against each other as warmth surged to my pussy.
"Just a useful kind of thing to have around." He chuckled and maneuvered the tantalizing instrument along the line of my throat to its hollow.
"Oh, my!" I whispered. I lay back on his arm and closed my eyes to let the room steady itself. "Oh, my!" And I opened them and gazed into his face.
I knew my adoration showed; I couldn't have concealed it if I'd wanted to. And it wouldn't have been honest to try. John appeared to read my expression clearly. He smiled-a tender, warm smile-and continued to stroke the flesh around the base of my throat with the feather.
"Trouble with you is it's been all work and no play," he remarked gently.
"Oh, John, that's not so," I protested in a low voice. "I've got hours and hours of free time every day!"
He wasn't going to let me get away with that kind of evasive response. "Playtime, not free time. Sure you've had free time. But no play." He shook his head. "Rose told me at the first. She said not to neglect you."
"John-John, you hired me as a secretary. And that's what I came here for. I've gotten everything the contract called for. And being able to have Rolf out here has been a bonus you people gave me out of the goodness of your hearts."
"Sugar, don't fight it. You're not just going to an office to a job. You're living on the job. When a guy hires somebody to live on the job, he's got to see to it everything's there for living."
"But-"
"But you're all woman, Anne. I don't need Rose to tell me that. And I haven't done anything for that side of your living."
Another man could have said precisely the same words and made himself sound insufferably conceited and patronizing. When John said them he sounded apologetic and solemn and genuinely concerned about me. And somehow we'd gotten across the room to the couch. We sank onto it and I found myself halfway lying across him, supported by his arm while he traced invisible, thrilling patterns with the feather.
I laughed with a catch in my voice. "John-honey-I don't see how you can apologize for that. I've never figured my boss was responsible for supplying my sex life-especially when he was happily married." I had to grin, then. "In fact, I'd have thought a boss was presumptuous if he got the idea that was his duty."
He sighed, evidently pleased I'd been willing to mention sex explicitly. "I know that, puss. I know that. But you mean more to us than most women could. There's something about the way you handle life that fits. And we think it's unfair to deny ourselves-or you-the pleasure of that outlook."
It was a horrible time to find myself speechless. There just didn't seem to be anything I could say. The phrases that flashed into my mind were either conventional and stuffy or gushy and unlike me. And I was trying so hard to think of the right comment I wasn't paying attention to my expression. I realized finally I was simply smiling up at him, my eyes half-closed and my lips parted while they waited for me to tell them what to say. John smiled tenderly and lowered his head and pressed his mouth to mine. A wave of heat washed over me as I caught the back of his head with my hand and gulped at his lips. It was a greedy kiss. After the first second or two neither of us maintained much reserve. I wolfed his lips and he rocked his head and flattened my eager lips over my teeth. His tongue explored my thrusting skin and I sucked it into my mouth with a convulsive gulp and mauled it with my own. And through the fierce pressure, I mumbled to him.
"John-mmm-mmm-John, love-mmmmmm...."
He surfaced at last, raising his head and smiling contentedly down at me. I know there were tears of happiness in my eyes, because his dear face was blurred and the room's dim light looked wavery. I let him lower my shoulders and when he began to caress my throat with the feather again I let my head drop back and shivered with delight.
He didn't confine the delicious strokes to my throat. The supple barbs at the tip brushed my lips and teased my eyelids and drove me out of my mind when they fluttered along the creases around my ears. My breasts heaved with my agitation and I blew my breath softly past pursed lips.
"Oh, John! John, darling! Omigod, the things that does to me!"
"Pretty special tool," he commented lightly.
I was going to feel that magical touch all over my body, I was confident. And before he left my sitting room he was going to use another very special tool where the feather wouldn't reach. The awareness rushed over me and fired a wild impatience I couldn't contain. I twisted on his arm and pulled myself up to press against him.
"Darling," I whispered. "Darling, I'd like to have my clothes off."
"I'd like that, too, puss."
With a calm I didn't feel, I disengaged myself from his grip and stood. Unhurried and deliberate, he began to undress me. To my surprise, he unzipped my skirt and worked it off first. I think he sensed my unspoken question, because he took my hands and smiled as he studied me.
"Used to work from the other end," he commented. "Blouse, bra-refreshing to look at a woman who's dressed from the waist down and nude from there up. But you've got such good legs and hips I figured this would accent the length and taper."
With a bewildered feeling of unreality I let him lead me into the bedroom, where he showed me what he meant. It was true. In the full-length mirror I could see how right he was. My blouse was a fitted one, and the waist clung snugly to my flesh and there was a flare that lay smoothly on the upper slopes of my hips. The panties I wore were brief and filmy, but I wore them over pantyhose and the nylon-sheathed taper of my legs did make me look like a long-legged, seductive creature out of a model agency.
"Okay," I said with a gulp. "You made your point."
We returned to the sitting room, where he removed the superfluous panties and started unbuttoning my blouse. I rested my hands on his shoulders to quiet their trembling. The blouse sprang open as the buttons came unfastened, and soon I had to drop my arms to my sides so the garment could fall from them. John reached around me to unhook my bra and I took advantage of the situation to thrust myself against him briefly. The tight band loosened and sagged away from my flesh and he held me, his hands warm and dry on my back. But in a moment he drew away and worked the straps off my shoulders.
When he laid the bra aside he looked at me for a long time without doing anything else. "God, what a lovely pair of breasts!" he exclaimed. "You can't be the age your application says!"
"Maybe not, but I am."
"For a woman your size! Honey, they're proud enough to salute the flag!"
"John! For goodness sake!"
He used the feather again before undressing me further. While I clasped my hands desperately at the small of my back, he dragged the tip over the bulging surfaces of my boobies and around my nipples in tight circles. I gasped sharply and watched the pink lumps swell and lengthen.
"Oh, golly!" I exclaimed. "Good God, honey! What a sensation!"
Goose bumps popped out all over me. John grinned and teased one nipple with the fine barbs at the end of the feather. The nipple hardened and drew itself into deep puckers while my breast throbbed. I felt my self-control slipping fast, and my hips twisted urgently while I fought to keep my boobie still for him.
He paused and stared critically, then grinned. "Can't have that; no symmetry!" And he applied the disastrous touch to my other breast.
My composure had evaporated. I was writhing shamelessly and digging at his shoulders with my nails. Foolish exclamations were bubbling from my lips and my breath was hissing fiercely through my teeth.
"God, John! You're turning me into a savage!"
He nodded, with satisfaction plain in his eyes. "Of course! Only a savage can fuck right. A civilized woman has too many hang-ups!"
He laid the feather aside and began to roll down the top of my pantyhose. As my lower belly came into view it shrank back, the muscles flinching involuntarily at my consciousness of his gaze. And I shuddered at his soft chuckle when the first strands of pubic hair sprang erect before him.
"Ha! Had an idea the color was honest!" he remarked in a triumphant tone. "Honey-blonde from one end to the other!"
"That's just the way it grew."
"Sure. Wait'll Blaine sees that! He doesn't believe pussy hair comes in light colors."
"Blaine!" I started violently. "Oh, no! I'll be damned!"
"Oh, relax! You're going to love the things Blaine does. He's a goddamn artist!"
"He scares me to death! I wouldn't let him near me with a ten-foot pole!" I felt myself flush, conscious of having twisted the metaphor. "I mean-"
John laughed easily. "Don't worry. He doesn't have a ten-foot pole. But he can make you feel like he does. Ask Rose! And by the time he gets to you with it you don't care; you haven't got enough judgment left to know the difference!"
"Oh, please, darling! Don't! I don't like him; he's too suave!"
"Well, we can talk about that some other time." He slipped my shoes off and carefully worked the pantyhose off my feet.
I stood quivering and naked before him while he touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. "Baby, they couldn't have done a better packaging job!" His tone was alive with enthusiasm. "Deluxe model the whole way!"
I shivered again and suddenly, unthinking, cringed and hugged myself. John's eyes flickered and he grabbed me, cuddling me tenderly.
"Easy, baby. Easy. Take it a step at a time. I forgot you weren't used to the Casa yet."
"What's that mean? Used to the Casa?"
"We'll talk about it sometime. Right now I want you, Anne. Just you."
"Oh, John, darling! John, you've got me! John, I love you!"
"Yes," he said. "It's got to be that way. There's got to be love."
He turned me, then, and reached for the feather. Still holding me with one arm but letting me stand away from him and facing me at an angle, he began caressing me with the feather. It was a devastating experience. My flesh seemed to crawl at the wispy touch and sensations crowded over each other. I forgot my self-consciousness and yielded to the thrill of the unique sensation. I let him turn and twist and bend me as he wished, writhing as each position change tuned another set of fibers to the incredible signals of the feather.
For a time, I hung back over his arm while the soft barbs tickled my belly and the inner front slopes of my thighs. And when he turned me and bent me with my ass up, I hung limply, fingers at my shins and feet clear of the floor, while the feather produced breathtaking sensations in my buttocks and along the winking crack between them. When he laid me on the couch and thrust my knees apart, I clenched my fists in anticipation of the pleasure I knew my pussy was going to transmit.
The feathery touch on my pussylips unhinged my control. My hips leaped and I twisted frantically. But John directed the teasing implement as if he'd used one all his life. And when he stripped back the hood of my clitoris with his thumb and one finger and tickled the sides of the tiny organ with the delicate barbs, I was completely beside myself with pleasure.
But he didn't let me get used to the marvelous sensation. While I was still settling my buttocks into their own depression in the couch cushion, he slipped the feather away from my pussy and ran it slowly down the inner side of my leg, letting the tip linger near my knee and then drawing it over my calf and around my ankle to the bottom of my foot. Moving to the other foot, he started a long, hesitant, tantalizing stroke up that leg. My pussy puckered and my belly tightened as anticipation grew. I held my breath while the feather tickled the crease outside the pussylips. And my sigh was one of sheer ecstasy when he finally drew it across the quivering lip onto the sensitized inner membranes.
He parted my distended pussylips to expose the mouth of my cunt and applied the feather to the thick, trembling rim. I threw my head back and ground it against the cushion, writhing with delight and hunger for his cock. And I cried out when he stripped my clitoris and again teased the erect cylinder with the feather.
In the moments when I was capable of meaningful action, I clawed at his clothes. Without interrupting the incessant stimulation, he let me undress him. When he was naked at last I caught his massive cock in one hand and clung to it as if it would steady me. Each time he shifted his weight I tugged at the delectable handle until I had it within reach, and then I rolled my head and twisted until I could kiss the darkened cockhead. My lips played over the broad slopes, stripping them of their wetness and caressing the velvety skin. And little by little I worked them over it until I enclosed the whole bulging knob in my mouth.
John's thighs tensed and I grabbed one and pulled at it. He yielded to my urging and swung his leg across me, facing me while he knelt astride my head. I tilted his cock and worked it deeper into my mouth, his balls resting on my throat and his buttocks warming my chest. But even as I began to suck seriously, he gently pulled free.
"John! Please!"
"Easy, sugar. Easy." He chuckled and reversed himself, still astride my head but with his back to me. And he lowered himself over me, his hands slipping under me and closing on my buttocks while his mouth went to my pussy.
With a sigh of delight, I caught at his ass, jerking down while he slowly extended his legs and lowered his cock into my gulping mouth again. My knees strained apart at the sensation of pussy flesh being engulfed in his mouth. While he chewed and sucked and his tongue probed deeply, I gobbled at his cockhead, sucking it to the arch of my throat and scrubbing it with my tongue.
Sometime during the greedy, noisy sucking, we rolled onto our sides, still clinging together and still hungrily eating at each other. He grabbed my clitoris and worried it with his tongue while sucking vigorously at it. I bobbed my head, running my lips back and forth along the last inch of his cock shaft and bumping the end of the head against the back of my throat. Tiny driblets of his thin fluid oozed from the slit and I sucked them into my throat and swallowed eagerly, my mouth puckering and my jaw working spasmodically.
When he abandoned my clitoris and thrust his tongue into my cunt, gobbling a great mouthful of the surrounding pussy flesh and chewing on it while his tongue drove inward, I slammed my cunt hard on his face and jerked madly at his cock, certain we were going to come that way.
But John had other plans. At the last moment he groaned and pulled his cock away again, releasing the tingling mouthful of pussy and thrusting himself up.
"Christ, baby! We match pretty good!"
"John! Oh, John, darling! Don't stop now! I want to come!"
He laughed and scrambled to his feet, stretching mightily and turning a loving grin on me. I could hardly tear my gaze from the splendid bulk of his cock. My belly churned and my thighs ached with my longing. But I did feel a glorious sense of exhilaration and freedom; there was a joyous atmosphere in the room now and I could have laughed at the most frightening ghost.
I leaped from the couch and flung myself on John. He staggered backward, laughing and clutching at me, and dropped onto my typing chair. With a sudden, savage jerk, he yanked me astride his lap and crushed me to him. I still stood, legs widespread and boobies bracketing his face. But he caught at my knees and forced them further and further apart while I slid down his body. I felt the hot bulk of his cockhead settle at my cunt and lifted my feet from the floor. With a searing plunge, I engulfed his cock, burying the head in the core of my belly and settling to the base of the shaft.
"UNNHHH! Ooooh, John, John! It's so much!"
"Christ, the heat in that pussy!" he grunted. "Great, baby! Just great"
I tried to bounce on the rigid cock, but my feet kept slipping and ruining the cadence. John laughed happily and fingered my buttocks. "Want to do it yourself, puss?" he asked.
"Yes!" I grunted explosively. "Oh, John, I want to fuck you the first time!"
"Okay. Try this." He grasped my ankles and lifted, pulling them up behind me while my knees swung downward in an arc until my thighs, sharply angled, pointed straight toward the floor. He laid my insteps on his thighs, the soles of my feet upward, and I discovered I could cling to him with my feet and lever myself up and down with a delightful, springy bounce. Delirious with joy at the control I had, I surged furiously on his cock, pumping myself on it while he leaned back and stabbed it high into my guts.
The sensation was one of raw, savagely beautiful fulfillment. My excitement rocketed and waves of buzzing pleasure shook me. My belly knotted and throbbed and I could feel every nudge of the bulbous cockhead at its center. John seized my hips with his hands. He squeezed and kneaded, and his thumbs worked slowly around until they touched each side of my clitoris, but he let me do the fucking without interference. As he thumbed my clitoris my lust cascaded through me. I yelled firercely and battered him with my blows. My boobies leaped crazily and my hair flew in a jerking cloud.
"Ahhh! Oh, Jesus!" John groaned and reddened, the cords in his neck standing out as my motion drove his excitement up. "You fuck like a goddamn expert, Anne! UNNHHH! When I come it's going to blow you right through the ceiling!"
"Hang-onto me-then!" I panted and flogged myself harder on him.
I didn't care whether he blew me through the ceiling or not. I was gorging myself on that beautiful cock and he was handling me and looking at me as if he loved me and the whole world was mine. I was going to come in a matter of seconds, and when I did I wouldn't be conscious of anything else in the world.
I grated words at him hoarsely as the knot in my belly began to quiver in the first, tentative twitches of orgasm.
"FUCK, DARLING! FUCK, FUCK! UP HARD, DARLING! AGGHHH!"
His hips drove upward and I jammed myself onto the base of his cock, holding myself there while a fierce tremor shook me and violent contractions twisted my vagina. His cock jerked convulsively and the heat of his cum warmed my gut. I whimpered with the ferocity of the orgasm and ground myself on the hardness at the root of his cock. And when the spasms began to subside, I let my feet slide from his thighs and swung them forward so I could clamp my thighs on his lean hips.
He pulled me against himself and held me, his hands stroking my back with short, nervous jerks. Only then did I realize how much we'd exerted ourselves. Sweat rolled off us and there was a hot pool of it where our bodies met. We both gasped noisily for air and our mouths were wet while we greedily continued to kiss each other's flesh in the aftermath of the mating.
John groaned happily. "God, you fuck wildly, Anne! Wish I'd asked you a month ago!"
"The very first day, John!" I sighed and hugged him. "I loved you so, the very first day I was ready!"
"And I wasted all that time." He groaned again, then laughed. "Glad I didn't wait any longer. Made a lot better selection than I realized when I hired you. You're our kind of woman!"
I squirmed on his softening cock and decided I could afford to be blunt. "You-the four of you don't worry about who's married to whom, do you?"
He chuckled. Only when we get around to filing our income tax returns. Of course, each couple has a separate bedroom. But we keep things circulating."
"What about Maria?"
"Maria? She'll circulate. She wants to pick her own time, but there'll come a day when she's ready to start."
"But she knows."
"Oh, sure! Why not? Funny kid, Maria. Can't figure why she hasn't gotten started yet! She's as hot as a red pepper! Practically turns inside out sometimes resisting the urge! Maybe she's waiting for some kind of special sign or something before giving up her cherry."
"She's terribly intense. She resents me, John. I get the idea she's reliving the feud between Lolita and Jennifer."
"Oh, I doubt it. Anyhow, we'd all like you to become part of the group. Think you could reserve judgment of Blaine long enough to give us a chance?"
I answered in a low, hesitant voice. "I-I don't really want to, John. But I don't have any kind of experience to go on. If-if you want me to I will."
"Just for me? For me, Anne?" He sounded startled, as if he hadn't really believed me when I'd said I loved him.
"John, I love you." I said it quietly and evenly. "I love you. I'll do anything you ask me to do." And to take the solemnity and the possible sense of threat out of the words I grinned and added, "Once. The second time will have to be because the first time was fun." That didn't sound quite right, either, and I tried once more. "I don't want to sound sober, honey. But I mean it. Anything! And as long as it doesn't cripple me or something awful like that I'll never refuse. Even that damn Blaine!"
He laughed, his guffaws bouncing me on a cock that should have been limp by then but wasn't. "Jesus, woman! Oh, how I wish Gamiski could have heard that! He'd be fit to be tied! Hey, speaking of tying! If I asked you, would you let me tie you for a session?"
I shivered, remembering the only experience I'd had with that helpless, wild sensation of sex in bondage. But I nodded. "Yes. I trust you."
"Someday, then." And he gave me a bear hug I thought would crack my ribs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
John stayed with me a long time. He petted and caressed me as if I were a bride and that amazing cock of his never did go entirely flaccid. We whispered things we remembered from childhood and I began to get a feel for the isolation the Duncans and de Vascas had known at Casa del Gato in the years when he was growing up. His parents and Kim's had been as free-thinking as he now was, he told me. And he and Kim had responded naturally to the atmosphere of frank sex; he and his then-black-haired cousin had launched their sexual careers together when he was fourteen and she twelve. And one of their prime requirements when ideas of marriage began to form was to bring home individuals who could be happy and generous in such an environment.
We were in my bed, snuggling cozily after the second or third fucking, when he sighed and admitted something that removed a great weight from my mind.
"That was a funny time," he said in a musing tone. "When Kim and I were starting, I mean. Well, maybe even a year or so before that. Kim was just turning into a woman-sprouting breasts and all that-and I was a couple of years ahead of her. Lolita-she was about the most oversexed woman I ever met. Christ, was she hot! And I'll bet I hadn't any more than found out what a hard-on was when she taught me what it was for! You know the chain and key she's wearing in that portrait? She wore the damn thing. All the time! Anne, even when she undressed she kept it on! I never saw her without it! And she used to say it was the key to her pussy. Anyhow, my mother got incensed about Lolita getting to me first. And she took on the job of teaching me the things Lolita had overlooked."
I gasped and John laughed comfortably.
He continued. "Aunt Jenny figured she knew a few little things the Mexican broads didn't, so she gave me some lessons, too. God! I like to fucked myself to death there for about a year! And poor little Kim seemed so naive and ignorant that first time. Only thing she had going for her was, she was just as hot as Lolita! And did she learn fast! I never could understand how I happened to get to her before my dad-or hers."
Afterward, when he'd gone back to his own bedroom and Rose, I knew what he'd been saying. There hadn't been any good reason to tell me all those things about Casa del Gato's sex history. But Rose had surely confided in him about Rolf-both about her own experiences with my son and the fact he'd made love to me-and John had been thoughtful enough to give me a shield against any future embarrassment over my relationship with my fifteen-year-old.
He took with him the aura of strength and confidence that had robbed the ghostly episodes of their effect. The shapeless dread I'd begun to live with returned and the shadows no longer seemed friendly.
I did sleep a little, though. And when day came my elation over knowing John loved me filled me with energy a week's sleep couldn't have. I know my eyes were sparkling. I know I radiated my new happiness and telegraphed to everybody what had happened during the night. And everybody warmed to my behavior and glowed with welcome-except Maria.
Oh, Blaine was an exception of sorts, too. He was obviously as pleased as the rest, and he didn't hesitate to let me know it. But he did so with glances that assured me he'd be cashing in on the swapping situation before I could do more than turn around. His leering eagerness frightened me horribly and it was only the promise I'd made John that enabled me to respond with an assenting smile.
Maria was something else. If I'd been alone with her I think she'd have killed me without changing expression. Her eyes had a stricken, abandoned, haunted expression and her face could have been a model for a portrait in despair. She hardly touched her breakfast and she didn't even come to lunch at all.
I noted her reaction and forgot it; there was too much happiness to be lived. The library had always been a delightful place for me because of the fact I shared it with John, but that day it was sickening in its atmosphere of euphoria. I'd never been quite so inflated by joy in my life. And the day was over almost before it had begun.
Rolf was waiting in the arcade for me. "You've got to come see the snakes, Mom," he insisted.
Now, I could have spent the rest of my life contented without visiting Blaine's rattlesnakes. But I couldn't put a damper on my son's enthusiasm. If something about the damn snakes had stirred him I'd bury my own reluctance and encourage him the way I had about spiders when he was ten, and frogs when he was eleven, and....
Well, a mother was special in her son's universe.
If she wanted him to develop intellectual curiosity, she tried to share his enthusiasms. So we went to the compound. I knew the snakes were defanged-that they were contented in the natural surroundings Blaine provided-but it was a struggle to overcome my fear of going into the enclosure. Several of the big reptiles glided to him at once. And although he offered them nothing to eat they raised their heads and appeared to preen while he stroked them. In moments, he had a half-dozen crawling on him.
"Come on, Mom. Sit down and get acquainted."
The air was unusually chilly and I expected the sand to be cold, but it was only a little less than body temperature. I wasn't really enthused about sitting, though; it would have been nice to feel I could rim if I wanted to. But the small rattler that left Rolf and came toward me reminded me somehow of a curious adolescent, and I watched it with amusement. Following Rolfs low-voiced instructions, I put my hand on the ground and let the little fellow explore it with its flickering tongue. The sensation was of a lightning-rapid touch a hundred times lighter than John's feather. But when the snake rubbed its chin in my hand the similarity ended.
Rolf's eyes glittered and he trembled with excitement. "Mom! Fantastic! The very first try! And Joe's shy!"
Joe. Shy? Maybe, but he was certainly working up an ecstasy with his chin rustling over my arm. I think I must have been a little hysterical at that moment. All I could think of was how dry and silky his skin was. The scales made it seem silky, I supposed. And it would be ridiciulous to expect slime in this desert setting. In fact, the concept of
"coldbloodedness" seemed terribly misleading right then. His body temperature was about the same as the sand and felt warm on my arm.
I was so bemused and concentrated so on his temperature and texture I didn't even react when he began crawling up my arm. He coiled one loop, then another, of his body around the limb and worked his way steadily upward, clearly satisfied I meant him no harm. But when two of the larger rattlers approached me I protested.
"Oh, God, Rolf! Look!"
He acted as if he were beside himself with delight. "Yeah! Jeez, Mom! You're fabulous! That's just how they are with Maria!"
His mention of Maria's name was like a needle. I gritted my teeth and remained stationary. Joe continued crawling up my arm and the darker of the other two reconnoitered my knee with his flicking tongue. Rolf leaned forward, ignoring the snakes that had settled themselves on him, and watched avidly.
"That dark one is Diablo," he whispered. "The other big one is Pedro. Mom, they really like you!"
Diablo heaved himself onto my thigh and crawled across my lap, curling himself into a solid lump in the depression and hiding his head. Pedro acted less sure of himself. Again and again his tongue flickered over my stocking and time after time he drew his head back to study the shimmering surface.
"Pet him, Mom. Rub his head, real slow. Don't startle him."
Leaning on the hand Joe had crawled over, I extended the other slowly toward Pedro's head. He arched his neck and watched, unblinking. But he did let me touch him, and I stroked the hard head gently without alarming him. At length he dropped back to the sand and resumed his exploration of my leg.
But I lost interest in him abruptly. Joe's head had slipped through the armhole of my blouse and his body was following.
"Omigod, Rolf! Rolf! What do I do now!"
"He won't hurt you, Mom. Just hold still. When he gets settled, you can get him out without getting him upset."
"To hell with that! I'm upset right now!"
"Don't bug him, Mom! He'll bite!"
"BITE! I though they were defanged!"
"Sure! But they've still got teeth! And they can bite pretty hard! Look." He grasped one of the rattlers by the neck and pressed the points of its jaw. The mouth gaped to reveal rows of needle-sharp, gleaming teeth.
I gave up the idea of arguing with Joe. But I writhed inwardly. His head glided over the upper bulge of my breast and into the hollow between the warm mounds. I realized too late that my round-shouldered posture pressed my boobies toward each other and let the bra gap where the cups were joined by a broad band. Into the pocket the gap made went Joe's head. And while I held my breath and stifled a shriek of terror, he began to crowd his body in. He was a firm, muscular snake. His body was so much harder than the tissue in my breasts there was no comparison. And he crowded them and reshaped them to make room for himself.
Not content merely to have found a warm, snug place to sleep, he explored. His head probed restlessly inside my left cup until it reached my nipple, and I nearly fainted from the sensation he produced when he flicked his tongue over the sensitized surface.
New horror waited for my attention. Pedro had discovered the boundary between stocking and flesh, nosing out a place where I'd carelessly let my skirt hike. And he was dragging his thick bulk over my thigh and out of sight under my skirt. I whimpered helplessly while he forced his way into the dark nest at my crotch. And when he'd settled and was a warm, motionless mass against my pussy, I looked up to see Rolf grinning broadly.
"You rat!" I hissed at him. "You knew they'd do that!"
"No! Mom, I didn't! Honest! There's none of them inside my clothes!"
He was telling the truth. I realized my predicament was as much a surprise to him as to me. But he was taking it better, and I could see he enjoyed it.
"Boy!" He grinned. "Those guys know what they're doing!"
As I gradually became accustomed to the notion of having snakes curled up in sensitive areas-or having them touch me at all, I guess-I calmed. There was nothing repulsive about the way their skin felt to me. And the ribbed strength and firmness of their bodies did enable them to thrust against me in a way that aroused intensely pleasurable tingles. So I simply sat and learned to enjoy an aspect of Rolf's new interest he hadn't anticipated.
His eyes widened suddenly and he drew a sharp breath. "Mom!" he whispered. "Turn your head real slow! Look!"
I did so. Perhaps fifteen feet from me, I saw the most enormous rattler I'd ever dreamed of. It had a distinctive set of markings and at the center of each diamond on its back was a dark spot that looked iridescent. I gasped.
"He's Blaine's favorite," whispered Rolf. "Biggest one he's ever seen. He says he's the king."
"What's he call him?"
Rolf chuckled softly. "He let Maria name him. She fell in love with it when Blaine caught it."
"What's she call it?"
"Don Juan. I think she means after her father."
I was sure she'd do that. But I damn well wasn't going to have that monster curling up against my pussy! Or anywhere else on me! He was just too big.
"How do I get rid of these passengers?" I asked Rolf. "I think it's time I get out of here."
"Well...." Rolf hesitated. "Okay, I think I know. Let me get these guys off first." Gently and patiently he urged one rattler after another off him until they'd all left. Moving slowly and easily, he stepped behind me.
"If you'll unbutton the top couple of buttons on your blouse I'll unfasten your bra, Mom. Know where Joe's head is?"
I nodded and pointed at my left breast. "Inside the cup."
His eyes widened. "Can't afford to scare him, then. When you've got your blouse unbuttoned far enough put your hand inside-up by your shoulder-and hang onto the strap so the bra doesn't go loose too quick. Then just do what I tell you."
I unfastened buttons from my neckline to a point below my breasts. And I held the strap at my shoulder while Rolf reached inside the back of my blouse and unfastened the hooks in my bra.
"I'm going to get my hand in there and get his neck, Mom. Let go of the strap when I say. But I've got to get my fingers over him first, while he can't see what they are. He'll just think it's another snake and he won't mind that."
His hand slid past mine and onto the pulsing flesh of my breast. I heard his breath hiss sharply and imagined he was reacting to the unexpected chance to feel me up. But his fingers moved steadily, worming their way between flesh and cup until they encountered Joe's neck.
"Now, Mom. Don't get uptight. I want to get my thumb under his chin. I don't think he'd bite you now, but it's not worth the risk."
"All right," I whispered. The sensation of that young hand inside my bra was fast destroying my composure, but I hadn't any way to prepare for the jolt of excitement that rocked me when his thumbnail depressed my nipple and wedged Joe's chin away from it. With a quick, fluid movement, my son's hand closed on the quiet snake.
"Let go of the strap!"
I let go and the cups fell forward away from my boobies. Rolf withdrew his hand, Joe's body jerking and coiling around his wrist. The rattles buzzed with a sound like the rustling of dry leaves while he carried Joe away from me. In a moment he came back and lifted Diablo off my lap. I couldn't go through the contortions of refastening my bra, but I'd already buttoned my blouse. And I knew what had to be done about Pedro.
When Rolf had deposited Diablo and returned, I steeled myself.
"He's burrowed down real snug, hon. I think his head is right against the crotch of my panties. I'll get the skirt out of the way when you're ready."
He colored. "Mom, I don't think that's very good."
"Why?"
"I think the light's going to startle him. And when I move my hand to get hold of him he's going to strike at something."
"Oh, dear! You've got to go after him blind?"
"You could do it."
Like hell I could, I thought. I wasn't about to try that. Rolf could stick his hand up my twat to his shoulder first!
"You do it," I murmured. "Listen. That knob at the corner of his head-it's pushed right against my clitoris."
"Jeez!" There was a distinct note of awe in his voice. "Jeez, Mom!" He grinned delightedly. "Good thing he isn't rubbing!"
"It's been bad enough as it is. Get him out of there!"
He stretched on the sand and ran his hand up the ridge of my thigh. When his fingers reached my panties he slid them gently across and onto my mound. And while I held my breath and perspired because I couldn't prevent my pussy from squirming when his hand burrowed against it, he got to Pedro's neck and drew the bulky body slowly into the open.
I sagged back onto the sand and went limp. Out of the comer of my eye I watched Rolf as he placed Pedro at the base of one of the heaps of rocks. He started back.
"Mom!" His tone was urgent. "Move easy, but get up!"
Suddenly taut in every muscle, I pushed myself to a sitting position, then rose carefully. Behind me, the forward two feet of his magnificent body raised inquisitively, Don Juan reared motionless.
"Omigod!" I groaned huskily.
Rolf's low voice steadied me. "He's willing to make friends, Mom! Don't miss the chance!"
I reached toward the elevated head and found myself stroking its massive bumps. The rattler responded almost as Margarita might have. He arched his neck and swayed gently. And when he started to explore my hand with the darting tongue I held absolutely still for him. But I didn't encourage him to use my arm for a ramp, nor did he attempt to. When he'd thoroughly explored my hand and forearm he lowered himself to the sand and watched me, merely holding his head a few inches off the ground.
"Now, Rolf? Please?"
"Sure."
We left the compound. To my surprise, Rolf was far more enthused by the antics of the rattlers than by the opportunity he'd had to feel me up. Even when I stopped and had him fasten my bra he kept talking about his new friends.
"They're weird, aren't they, Mom! Cool!"
In all honesty I had to agree with him. They'd shown distinct personalities and the horror I'd always felt for reptiles seemed to have left me. I didn't have to pretend interest; it was real. And I found myself agreeable to Rolfs urging that I visit the compound more often. I did make a promise to myself, however. I was going to be more cautious about getting down on the ground around those brutes!
Rolf was full of the news I'd made friends with the snakes; he made the announcement at supper as proudly as if I'd achieved some remarkable goal. The others appeared to share his delight and even Maria regarded me with something less hostile than her usual glare.
John and I spent an hour in the library after the meal, mostly reviewing what needed to be done before we could ship the nearly completed manuscript, and then we started to lock up. The lantern was missing again.
John's expression clouded fiercely and he swore a long string of blistering epithets. When he'd seemingly run out of steam I suggested I might have an idea what was happening to the lantern.
"What, for Christ's sake?"
Wincing at the expression of incredulity that quickly spread over his features, I described the ghostly figure of the garden. "Whoever or whatever it was, it came into the library through that window we found open," I told him in conclusion.
"Well, the damn window was open. We know that. And nobody has the key but you and me-the key to the door, I mean. I'd rather think it was a ghost that opened that window than try to believe somebody else could pick the lock on the door."
"Honey?"
"Yeah?"
"Are there any spare locks here?"
He looked puzzled, then appeared to understand. "I think so. In the basement shop."
"Would it be much trouble to replace this one?"
"No. Blaine and I could do it in about a half-hour."
"Would you? And just for tonight would you keep the key?"
"Huh?"
"Please, honey?"
After a long pause he nodded. "Okay. I know what you're saying. Come on."
Blaine grumbled at first, but he helped John and before we went upstairs for the night there was a new lock in the library door and John had the keys. If my ghost went through the window, John would know I hadn't walked in my sleep and unlocked the door and all the other things I'd have to do.
I went to bed knowing the "ghost" would walk in the garden before morning. And I knew I'd be awake to watch it. I didn't know what else would happen, and I was filled with dread recognizing the fact.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was half-ashamed to be in bed so early; surely nobody else in the house had gone to bed yet. I'd gotten ready before nine o'clock, and I'd stood in my darkened window, my skin still moist from the shower, and let the feebly stirring desert air dry me while I'd watched the ghostly gray of the skyline disappear in the east as the quarter moon set in the west, where I couldn't see it. Stars had blazed brilliantly, their rays casting a deceptive, silvery radiance over the still landscape without illuminating it. And I'd turned to throw myself on my bed, knowing the desert creatures were abroad risking their lives to go on living.
Rodents and lizards and monster-eyed insects were prowling and, perhaps, cavorting. And here and there an owl was whisking silently above with deadly watchfulness. As the temperature slowly fell in the upper layers of sand and among the rocks, the sluggish rattlers, guided by their heat sensors, would glide restlessly toward the slowest cooling crevices for warmth, but they wouldn't sleep; they'd sense the approach of any creature suitable for food.
I felt a sudden gush of self-contempt. Here I lay, hoping to sleep for a few hours before the "haunting" began again. I was meekly allowing myself to be driven into a state of panic without doing anything to help myself. And that was totally out of character. I took pride in the fact I knew the woman, Anne Kelig. I might not admire every last thing I knew, but I did know. And one of the features I took the-fiercest pride in was independence. Nobody looked out for a woman who didn't look out for herself, I believed. And I'd spent years doing that.
So lying there trying to get a little sleep before the "ghost" woke me was plain damn weakness; what else could I do? I couldn't rally people to help me; they didn't believe I was seeing and hearing what I was. The owl incident had ruined any chance of making John believe. So I was on my own.
Looking at the "haunting" with a hard-boiled attitude did one thing immediately. It rid me of the nagging fear there might be something supernatural about what was happening. A real ghost would have carried a ghost lantern, for example. And "it" wouldn't have needed an open window. Maria had to be at the bottom of everything. Maybe she had help, but she was surely the key to the mystery. And if I meant to do anything besides wait for her in my room, I'd have to base my actions on what I knew about her.
The missing lantern convinced me she'd do the "ghost" walk in the garden again. She'd reenact that part of Lolita's legend where Lolita's ghost walked from the crypt to the house. To catch her in the act so she couldn't shrug me off with some innocent story, I'd probably have the strongest case if I confronted her at the crypt. The idea seemed the only natural thing to do. It felt so right the tension drained away and I barely got the alarm set before I fell asleep. At midnight I turned off the alarm and stumbled about the room trying groggily to remember why I'd set it. Pulling a thick blanket around me the way I'd seen Maria do, I slipped my feet into a pair of sandals and crept out of the house.
The garden-stocked with every species of cactus that grew in the surrounding desert-extended east from the house to the first low ridge. The de Vasca crypt was built halfway down the far slope of that ridge, where it received the first rays of the rising sun. Although a long, narrow, barred window admitted those first rays to the interior of the little building, the entrance faced up the ridge toward the house. And in the impenetrable shadow of the entrance, the grating that sealed the crypt at my back, I could wait unseen while Maria approached.
The silence was absolute for the first few minutes. But as I remained motionless, hugging the blanket tightly and suddenly aware of its scratchiness on my bare skin (wondering why I couldn't have awakened sufficiently to remember to put some kind of clothes on) sounds of the creatures I'd thought about began to reach me. Scurryings between the scraggly, wild shrubs, a startled flutter of wings from a rudely awakened bird, the soft rustle of air through the feathers of a gliding owl, a coyote's yapping wail. And a momentary gust of breeze came out of nowhere to stir the brush and turn the arms of an ancient windmill down the slope, the squeaking yanking my throat taut before I realized what it was.
Time seemed to drag and I grew accustomed to the natural noises. I couldn't adjust as readily to the windmill, the gusts being too unpredictable and each producing a slightly different combination of squeaks and groans from the discouraged metal. Most unnerving of all, the windmill was situated in such a way that the sounds came half the time through the window and the grating of the crypt instead of around it. Time after time I had to scold myself for the wild fear something was being opened on creaking hinges inside the black vault.
A sudden clattering noise, as if a small stone had been dislodged to roll across the ground, brought me erect. Somewhere in the low brush of the slope something besides mice and lizards was moving. At a repetition of the sound a few feet away from where I thought I'd heard it the first time, I shrank deeper into the shadows and pressed my shoulders against the grating. I had enough presence of mind to be sure my hands didn't show at the edges of the blanket, and I held my breath while I tried to pierce the uncertain starlight to see.
Something brushed the blanket at waist level. I gasped and stiffened, but even as I did, something had been passed across my front and was jerked back to pin me to the grating. I had no idea what kind of strap it was, but it held me just below my breasts, clamping my arms to my body inside the blanket. And while I was still fighting the paralysis that had settled on me, a thick, rough hood descended over my head and was drawn snug around my neck.
I screamed once, then, but the hood seemed to confine every quaver of my voice. Flinging myself against the strap didn't do anything for me; I was helpless. When the grating started to move, swinging ponderously outward, I could only move in its arc with it. And when the strap was momentarily loosened from the ironwork, it was drawn tightly around me and fastened again before I was aware of what had happened.
"NO! NO!" I cried out against the baffling hood. "Who are you? Let me go! Let me go!"
I heard no reply. I heard nothing! But I felt my upper arms seized through the blanket and yielded to the thrust of my captor's hands. I walked hesitantly and reluctantly, feeling the ground ahead of me at each step and pressing back feebly, but I knew I had no hope of spoiling whatever plan the silent kidnaper had.
I was confident it was Maria. I couldn't imagine how she'd gotten to the crypt-and inside it-without my seeing or hearing her, but it could be nobody else. And I'd played into her hands as if she'd written the instructions for me! But as we continued to walk I couldn't guess where we were going. Our path twisted frequently, the ground sloping up now on our left, then on our right until my sense of direction was hopelessly confused.
At last we stopped. Gloved hands caught my wrists and, jerking the blanket out of the way, crossed my wrists behind me. In a moment, the night air playing over my exposed belly and legs, my hands were securely lashed together between my back and the blanket. My captor wrapped the blanket around me again and forced me to my knees. I shuddered as I knelt; my back touched a low stake that the blanket had settled outside of. And it was no surprise when my captor reached under the edge of the blanket and lifted it long enough to fasten my wrist lashings to the stake. The drawstring at the bottom of the hood was loosened and I felt no further touch from whoever had made me prisoner.
I don't know now what I anticipated. I know I let my buttocks settle on my heels and cringed, waiting. But nothing happened. And at last I knew I was alone. My first tug at my wrists made the blanket slip at my shoulders. If I lost that protection, I thought with cold horror, I'd be kneeling there naked until I could get loose or somebody rescued me. And the night was too cold for that. But I found in time that I could crouch, bending forward and turning enough to keep my arms from being dislocated, in such a way as to let the blanket lie on me like a loose cover. In that position I was able to shake the hood from my head.
I'd been right. I was alone. The hood that lay beneath my face was one of the heavy bags Blaine used to carry newly captured snakes in. It was no wonder it had seemed so invulnerable to noise penetration! And as I turned my head slowly from side to side I made the discovery that I was in the snake compound.
I groaned miserably. Thanks to Rolf and his introduction of the afternoon I wasn't terribly frightened; I knew I wouldn't get hurt if I relaxed. But I was doubtful I could stay where I was for long without some of the more restless rattlers detecting my body heat. The likelihood seemed to me to increase as the tightly woven blanket trapped the warming air and created a cozy shelter for me. Only at my front, where the edges gaped, did I feel cool air settling in to displace that I was heating.
I didn't have long to wait. Several long, fat shapes appeared, gliding slowly across the sand to me. And one of them I recognized with sharp apprehension. Don Juan was homing in on the warmth I represented!
I screamed. The giant rattler reared and his tail buzzed. Scared, I screamed again. But awareness penetrated my swelling panic and I realized the noise was either frightening or irritating him; his advance had become menacing and I was in obvious danger from his teeth if I persisted in my attempts to alert people in the distant house. I bit my lip and sagged into a tight, huddled crouch.
Don Juan quieted gradually. The lesser rattlers acted as if he had some kind of prior right. They continued to approach, but none showed any inclination to reach me before him. He made for the gap in the blanket as if guided by the escaping warm air. I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming again when his head passed under my face, bare inches below it, and my muscles tensed viciously when he raised the huge, blunt-nosed triangle to flick his tongue over my breasts and belly. When he lowered it, his head settled between my knees. I flinched and uttered a soft moan of terror, but again I mustered the self-control to avoid a disastrous clamping together.
My thighs were hot enough where they touched each other near the top to feel sweaty. There, where the body heat was highest, the great snake wedged his dry, rough nose. With a sob of despair I thrust against the sand with my knees, inching them apart to avoid angering the intruder. His tongue flicked continuously, the darting touch arousing a sharp, insistent tingle in my crotch. He worked his head steadily closer to my pussy while horrible, unwanted surges of perverse excitement twitched my membranes. His body thickened immediately behind his head, bigger around than a man's arm and just as hard. It pressed between my thighs and drove thrills through me and made me slide my knees still further apart.
Don Juan showed none of the haste Joe or Pedro had to curl himself into a heap and go to sleep. His tongue explored the thickening wetness in the slit of my pussy while his head worked steadily back and forth between the quivering flesh of my thighs. His heavy body rustled as it slid past my face into the space under my body. And it slipped sideward over the front of one thigh and around it to the other. Horror and fascination blended within my growing agitation. The massive, powerful snake wrapped himself around both of my thighs in a figure eight that encircled each leg twice. And by drawing the coils tightly upward to my crotch he forced my legs apart as far as I could have separated them myself. His nose kept bumping the swelling tissues of my pussy lips and his tongue played maddeningly over the inner slopes as they unfolded.
"Oh, God!" I groaned in a choked voice. "Somebody's been training him! That goddamn Blaine's been using somebody to teach him tricks!"
One day made the difference between responsiveness and screaming insanity. I knew my predicament would have driven me out of my mind if it had happened before my son had brought me to the compound. Fear and revulsion would have burned out my mental fuses. But I'd learned snakes weren't as repulsive as I'd imagined, and I could adjust to this one.
The fact it was dark helped, though. Without visual evidence of the powerful body's constant movement I could lose myself in the physical stimulation of dry friction and continually active squeezing. The heavy coils compressed my thighs and relaxed and compressed without an instant's pause. The effect was that of a fantastic massage, and it generated a deep, fierce pleasure that melted my last shred of resistance.
In its continuing back-and-forth movement, his head repeatedly carried his probing tongue over my clitoris. And its delicate, incredibly rapid thrust inflamed the sensitive organ to an agonizing pitch of excitement. My breathing became a gasping struggle for air and my hips undulated with increasing force. I felt my cunt opening and closing like the hungry mouth of a fish and my muscles jerked uncontrollably at the too-frequent jabs of the bony nose into my slit.
I was conscious of the invasion by the other snakes only as a hazy activity on the edge of my excitement. They crawled up my thighs and over Don Juan's bulky coils and wound their own thick bodies around mine. My boobies were trapped between adjacent snakes and squeezed and twisted and my torso was soon enveloped within a living shroud. Their weight bowed me deeper, until my forehead pressed the sand and my shoulders ached from the strain on my arms. But all sensations were subordinate to those Don Juan produced. His nose burrowed into my slit and his powerful neck continued to weave back and forth. The blunt snout was dragged from end to end in the slippery trough while I cried out with ecstasy. I had no time to think, but a flash of recollection crossed the surface of my mind; snakes could close their nostrils and go without air for incredible periods of time while burrowing.
And Don Juan demonstrated. His snout settled at my cunt and pushed. I drew a sobbing lungful of air and shuddered violently. The busy tongue flicked at the throat of my vagina and the great, triangular head wedged my cuntmouth open and burrowed in. I choked at the immensity of the entering head. I felt as if my bony structure were being sprung. But the broad jaws plunged through the tortured ring and the powerful neck drove after the head, filling my vagina and jostling my internal organs aside. Using his purchase on my widespread thighs for leverage, the monstrous snake drove his head to the inner end of my vagina and filled my passage with his swelling neck.
I uttered a half-grunt, half-groan and thrust backward with my ass, as if I could plunge myself further onto his body. His coils worked upward still further, engulfing my hips and smothering my belly. But they didn't release their grip on the tops of my thighs. One hard ridge of his body rode over my clitoris and his constant flexing massaged the overwrought lump unmercifully.
In the flood of lust that overwhelmed me I knew without thinking about it that every inch of my body except my head was being caressed by the constricting coils of Blaine's snakes. A dry, writhing body even had a firm ridge wedged into the crack between my asscheeks. And my breasts were being kneaded in a powerful, slow-churning grip. I had no way to cope with the insane jumble of sensations and knew I was already at the beginning of my orgasm.
I looked back under myself past coil after gray coil to the fabulous bulk of Don Juan. And when I saw his huge rattle dangling next to one of my knees it came to me there was light. With dazed curiosity, I twisted and looked for the source.
"Jesus Christ!" said Blaine softly, setting an electric lantern down and kneeling a body's length from me. "Jesus, Anne! You're taking it!"
"Blaine! Oh, you son of a bitch, Blain Gamiski! Go away! You've done enough!"
I felt the violent contractions of my vaginal walls as they bore down on the burrowing snake. My body heaved helplessly under the burden of all the other heavy brutes and I went rigid. It felt as if my guts were turning inside out. Delight burst in me and radiated through me. I sobbed, half-delirious with the intensity of my climax. And I was afraid for a time I'd never stop coming. But the thrust of Don Juan's neck diminished and my spasms weakened. I collapsed, held in place only by the bonds on my wrists. And my cunt distended as the huge neck began to withdraw.
I cried out in alarm when the snake pulled his head free; I couldn't believe he'd get it out without pulling my guts out with it. But he did. And he made no further effort to relieve me of his presence. He snuggled the wet, slippery lumps of the wedge into the nest of my slit and remained tightly coiled around me. And the excitement that had burst into orgasm merely slipped to a barely lower level.
I blazed at Blaine. "Had your fun, you bastard? And all the time I thought I knew who'd brought me here!"
"Anne! For Christ's sake! You don't think I-"
"Of course I do!" Bitterness welled in my throat. "Big deal! Bet you got a whole truckload of kicks out of watching your goddamn snake fuck the widow secretary! What's next; one of the hogs?"
"Oh, shit, Anne! You've got it all wrong!"
"Yeah, sure!" And then, in hope as much as alarm, "Oh, Jesus! The son of a bitch is going to fuck me again!"
But Blaine threw himself down at my side as Don Juan butted at my cunt again. He slid the blanket off and spread it on the sand a dozen feet away, then seized the enormous neck with both hands.
"That blanket's going to stay warm for a while." He grunted, straining as he pulled the great head away from my pussy. "It's going to take a few minutes to get these fellows off you. Just don't make any sudden moves."
"I-I can't-move-at all! They're too-heavy!"
I gasped at the force the huge snake exerted as he resisted Blaine's efforts. He squeezed my thighs so powerfully I thought the pressure alone would make me come again. But the coils yielded an inch at a time and Blaine finally lifted the massive body clear of my legs and deposited it on the blanket.
"This is the touchy time!" he exclaimed, coming quickly back to me. "Gotta get one or two more over there with him before he tries to come back!"
He worked a second of the brutes loose from my left thigh and moved it to the blanket, then a third from my right leg. One by one, then, working calmly and talking constantly, he peeled the clinging rattlers from my body and piled them on the blanket. When the last was off, he jerked the lashings off my wrists and helped me to my feet. I let him clasp me in his arms, my flesh pressing tightly to him and squirming on his hardness.
"Christ, Blaine! Thanks! I don't know if you put me here in the first place, but thanks for getting me loose!"
"You don't like me, Anne."
"No! I don't trust you! Any further than a wild rattler!" I remembered John's quiet insistence I become part of the swap circle and realized I'd seldom be much more aroused than I was right now. "That doesn't matter! I'm on fire! Blaine, fuck me!"
His arms tightened with a jerk, then he held me away from him and devoured my nude body with a stare. "You mean that, Anne?" His voice sounded harsh.
"John says I'm wrong about you," I replied simply. "He said I ought to give you a chance to prove it-on your own terms."
"Hmph."
"Blaine-Blaine, things are so distorted tonight it's like being somebody else in some other world! I've got to get fucked by a man! I'll go crazy if I don't! I know I will! All those snakes!"
He grabbed me. "You're right!" The exultant note in his voice couldn't have been masked. "Come on! You don't want it in the snake compound!"
"God, no! Take me wherever you want, but get me the hell out of here!"
CHAPTER NINE
On the way back to the house I asked Blaine how he'd happened to come out to the compound at that time of night. I still half-suspected him of helping Maria.
"Wasn't in bed yet-playing games. Thought I heard you yell. Only your rooms were empty." He paused briefly, then added, "Found you weren't in Rolf's room, either."
"But why look for me in the snake compound?"
"Don't know. Maybe it was in the back of my mind you'd been down there in the afternoon. Nothing logical about it."
I wasn't convinced. But I couldn't see how I was to trap him. And another question was bothering me. "Don Juan. You trained him for that, didn't you?"
"For you?"
"For sex."
He chuckled. "They train easy. Smart as hell. He took to it easier than usual."
"How?" Then, more to the point, "Who?"
He laughed softly. "Kim. She really digs that."
"What about Maria?"
"No. I think she suspects, but she hasn't ever tried it. Not to my knowledge, anyhow."
"Just Kim? Won't Rose try it?"
"She knows how it feels. But you got the grand tour tonight! I don't think we've ever had that many even on Kim! Christ, they like you!"
"Brrr! Their scales are scratchy. I'm beginning to smart."
"We'll put some lotion on that ought to take out the sting."
"We?"
"Kim's going to want to know what the fuss was. And she's not going to let you out of her sight until she's got you comfortable. She knows what that snake fucking does to a woman's skin."
So we went directly to Blaine and Kim's rooms. In a few words, Blaine explained how he'd found me and I added a sketchy account of how I'd gotten there. Both of them insisted on knowing what I'd been doing at the crypt and were more than a little skeptical when I described the figure in the garden.
"Did you smell that scent this time?" Asked Kim.
I gasped. Of course, I had! I'd smelled it moments before hearing the clattering noise that had distracted me! And it had persisted until after I'd shaken off the hood. But Kim couldn't give me any help toward identifying it-not without being able to smell it herself.
They took me to their bedroom and had me stretch out on the bed while they applied the lotion. They had a great four-poster with a horizontal frame on top of the posts for a canopy. Only they said they'd never had a canopy on it.
"Too hard to keep clean," Kim remarked.
The lotion was a creamy stuff they had to rub in. And with two pairs of hands rubbing the areas where the greatest friction had occurred they had me aroused and gasping long before they'd finished. They worked from opposite sides of the bed, each kneeling at my side. And when they had completed back and front on my legs and torso, they straightened my arms and massaged vigorously. The way I'd been tied required extra attention to keep my arms from getting stiff, they suggested.
My excitement was subsiding and I was suddenly aware each of them had put something on one of my wrists. Before I could question them or protest, my arms were pulled into a spread-eagled position and secured by lines running to the posts at the head of the bed.
"Hey! NO! What are you doing?" Helpless and taut, I was suddenly terrified.
"Games, sweet," Kim answered, her voice vibrant with suppressed anticipation. "You look good this way, too."
"For God's sake! Let me up!"
"Huh. You asked me to fuck you, baby," Blaine said.
"You! Not everybody in the house!"
"There are just the two of us."
"Oh, Christ! That's one too many!"
But while we argued they placed soft leather cuffs on my ankles and ran lines over the side rails of the canopy frame. Hauling, they raised my feet and spread my legs at a fantastic angle, exposing my pussy and making it gape open with the strain.
I jerked furiously at the cuffs. The position humiliated me and scared me. I didn't trust Blaine anyhow, and the expression on Kim's face made me shiver. But when I jerked my legs it simply snapped my ass into the air and opened my pussy wider, while tugging at the wrist cuffs jiggled my boobies obscenely.
"PLEASE! FOR GOD'S SAKE, LET ME LOOSE!" I pleaded with them.
Both started taking off their clothes. Blaine looked more Mexican than Kim when they were dressed and as his clothes came off the disparity was all the more pronounced. He was darkly olive-hued. His hair was coarse and black. And his body had the lean, underfed lines I'd seen in pictures of Mexican boxers. But there wasn't anything lean or underfed about his cock. It rose menacingly from a dense patch of midnight-black pubic hair. Its shaft was darker than the rest of his skin and gleamed tautly, its smoothness disturbed only by heavy, knotted veins. His cockhead, like John's, was innocent of foreskin and had a dull, velvety sheen except where wetness made it glisten. I was startled at its color; it was almost black.
Kim's skin was a tawny color, a sharp contrast to the startling platinum tone of her hair. She had beautiful, globular breasts with finger-sized nipples. Her waist was slender and graceful but thicker than mine in proportion to her heroic stature. And when she removed her panties her pubic hair betrayed her natural coloring. It was glossy and tightly curled-a luxuriant cushion of blue-black with the edges of her pussylips peeping wetly beneath it. She moved like a cat and seemed to be intent on getting to me.
Blaine studied the two of us, his gaze going from one to the other repeatedly. His eyes were heavy-lidded and sensuous and his mouth worked. When he looked at me, his expression seemed deliberately insulting. He stared hungrily at my boobs and leeringly at my cunt. His tongue wetted his lips and he swallowed frequently. But he appeared almost as lewd in the way he surveyed his wife.
"Why don't you play with her a while, puss?" he asked Kim. "I think I'd really enjoy that."
Kim smiled sleepily. "So would I. There's a lot of woman in that little package."
"Plenty of movement, too," added Blaine with a grin. "Christ, you should have seen the way she heaved with those snakes!"
"Later," she murmured.
"Like hell!" I blazed at them. "I'm not getting into that again!"
They both laughed. Kim perched on the edge of the bed and ran her hand tantalizingly down the inner slope of my thigh, starting at the knee and brushing toward my pussy. I tensed and held my breath. When the edge of her palm touched the first strands of pussy hair I kicked violently. But again the only effect was to jerk my ass sideways. She stretched out beside me and laid one leg between my thighs, her calf riding on my pussy and her knee resting lightly on my lower belly. Raising herself on one elbow, she began to caress my boobs with the other hand. In spite of the revulsion I felt at being handled by a woman, I was fascinated by the delicate, sensitive touch of her fingers. Her own experience had taught her the pressure that was most stimulating and the spots where the erotic nerves were concentrated. And her fingers were slender and smoother than any man's; even Rolf, at fifteen, had broader, blunter hands than hers.
She lay close. The heat of her thigh's inner slope supplemented that of my pussy to create a steaming pocket between our flesh. Her belly touched my side lightly and one of her boobs lay pressed against the outer bulge of mine, soft flesh against soft flesh, a curiously thrilling sensation for me. I forgot my prejudice and moaned softly.
"Oh, my!" I whispered. "Right there, Kim!
Right there!" And I twisted my head from side to side with pleasure.
"It's not all that bad, is it Anne?" she murmured, too softly for her husband to hear. "Besides, it really turns a guy on to see a couple of women getting each other worked up."
It turned a guy on to see anything get a woman worked up, I reflected. Sticking his pecker in was a small part of the enjoyment he could get out of sex.
Kim rolled onto me, propping herself to keep from crushing the breath from me. She straddled my left leg, her own left thigh lying in the wetness of my pussy and her snatch bearing hard on the front ridge of my thigh. Propping herself on her elbows, she maneuvered her boobs so the nipples touched mine, then twisted so the brown lumps swished back and forth across the pink. I squirmed, trying desperately at first to dislodge the hatefully intimate female, then surrendering to the seductive delight of silken skin against smooth, hairless skin. I was intensely conscious of the wiry prickling of her pubic hair where my thigh reached my hip and the thick, slippery goo that lubricated her pussy on the ridge of my thigh. But in the grip of all the sensations that poured over me, I had to watch the play of tits on tits.
As she swayed from side to side, Kim gradually sank lower, her boobs pressing harder and harder on mine until all four mounds were flattened and rubbing with hot, dry friction. To my horror, she caught my face between her hands and held it while her mouth settled on my lips. I fought the kiss with the little control I had, wrenching first one arm and then the other to jerk myself to the side and attempting to snap my head back to evade her lips. But there seemed no way to deny her. Her lips were greedy and demanding. Some subtle scent she wore floated around us and her mouth tasted fresh and sweet to me, reminding me vaguely of new milk. As her mouth worked on mine my alarm and disgust melted. Eager pleasure quieted me and I responded with gulping, eager thrusts.
The thrusting of my mouth seemed to awaken something in my hips. The continual flexing of her thigh on my pussy generated pulses of delicious heat in me and my hips began to jerk, grinding my open pussylips on her flesh and rubbing the floor of my slit on her. She retaliated, scrubbing her twat in narrow circles on my tightly stretched, helpless leg."
The torrents of pleasure she awakened in me overwhelmed my habitual antagonism toward women. I couldn't defend myself and it had become ridiculous to defy the urgent clamoring of my body for the delightful sensations hers produced in me. Excusing my reversal of attitude on the basis of my total helplessness, I began to twist and squirm in a deliberate effort to extract every drop of pleasure from the experience. The results astonished me. Every movement I made to accept or prolong a pleasurable sensation seemed to inject a new dimension of enjoyment into the situation. I discovered I could stimulate Kim almost as effectively as she could me, even though my movements were so severely restricted. And it became a frenzied, savage game of seeing which of us could drive the other to the higher peak of excitement.
Kim recognized the change in my behavior. She murmured against my lips, whispering terms of endearment that I would have resented from a woman an hour before. And she raised herself again, her pussy still riding my leg and her own thigh hard on my snatch. She mouthed my tits, her lips gentle as they teased my hardened nipples. Tingles raced over me and made me groan happily.
"Oh, Kim!" I whispered. "Let me have yours for a minute! Please, honey!"
She lurched forward, one gorgeous boob swinging over my face and swaying there. I caught the long nipple in my mouth and sucked, running the tip of my tongue around the rim of the puckered lump and thrilling to her sharp intake of breath.
She pressed her chin to her chest and stared at the scene. By tilting my head back-without relaxing my hold on her tit-I could meet her gaze. A slow smile softened her pouting lips and she winked at me.
"I'm so glad, Anne, darling," she muttered. "We hoped for so much from you. And you were so reserved I began to think we'd been wrong." Her smile broadened to a grin. "Sometimes it does the guys good to see they're not the only ones who can get us hot."
I had to giggle at the comical way she put down men, but I held her nipple tenderly with my teeth and wouldn't let it go. With great care, I chewed at the rubbery lump until it squeaked in the grip of my teeth. Kim threw her head back and shuddered.
"Yaghhh!" she yelled. "God, Anne! That drives me up the wall!"
When I relaxed my hold she sagged on me for an instant and panted. "How did you ever learn that?" she demanded. "Good God, what a marvelous sensation!"
"That and Rolf are the two things my husband gave me." I didn't mean it to sound as bad as it did, but I wasn't going to apologize for the truth.
She disengaged herself then and turned around to kneel astride my upper chest. Dropping to her forearms she put her face to my pussy and licked at the inner faces of my pussylips. Her tongue felt smooth and soothing to me and the sweet scented darkness of her twat hovered before my face. I yielded to impulse and raised my head to return the favor. It was an awful strain on my neck, but I faced a situation I'd never even dreamed of. In the first place I'd never seen a pussy at close range. Her pussylips were thick, swollen ridges of soft flesh, the outer slopes dark and thickly overgrown with hair. But along the crest of each was a sharp zone of differentiation where the dark skin gave way to smooth, shiny tissue like the inside of a mouth. The inner slopes were thickly coated with a layer of fluid. And inside, lining the gaping trough, was a second set of petal-like lips that quivered and glistened, lighter-hued and almost translucent. Finally, centered in the rounded floor of her slit, her vagina stared blackly at me, its rim supporting thin, fluted projections that extended into its opening like the leaves of a camera diaphragm.
I shivered with anticipation and extended my tongue, sliding it along the groove between the inner and outer lips on one side of her slit. Her hips leaped convulsively, then settled back so her pussy touched my mouth with my head resting on the mattress. I sighed with relief at being able to avoid the terrible strain on my neck and began to lick with exploratory passes of my tongue. Her thick wetness had a flavor that puckered the back of my mouth and took away my breath. Slowly, delighted at the novel feeling of the wet tissues, I ran the tip of my tongue around the inside of her cunt and teased the flutings. Kim drove her tongue deep into my twat and twitched her hips as we lost ourselves in the mutual exercise.
Nuzzling her pussy, I repositioned her so I could get her clitoris into my mouth. I felt of the stiff little cylinder with my lips while her hips danced and shook. And I explored the cone-shaped head with my tongue. When I had finished exploring, I started to suck, rubbing the sides of the hard roll with my teeth and gently caressing the tip with my tongue. Kim jammed herself onto my mouth and grabbed my clit between her teeth. She gave me the same treatment I was giving her and both of us began to heave and groan. Jagged bolts of excitement coursed over me with the same kind of oscillation as alternating electricity. The intensity of my pleasure aroused savage impulses in me and I sucked ferociously at her. I knew we were going to come, and I was determined to make her reach her orgasm before I did mine.
But Blaine was evidently reaching the limit of his self-control, too. I heard him grunt fiercely and felt the bed sag as he dropped onto it on his knees.
"Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "You broads got too much going! What great livestock!"
It would have infuriated me to be called "livestock" under any ordinary circumstances. At this moment it was simply another kind of stimulation that drove a buzzing wave of lust through me. He laid one hand on Kim's ass and squeezed, then curled his fingers around in front of my nose and thrust three of them into her cunt. With a wicked chuckle, he then slid his other hand around my hip and onto my pussy, where he buried his thumb in me.
"Wish to Christ I had two cocks!" He said, mumbling. "Jesus, do I wish I had two!"
Kim released my clitoris for a moment and retorted. "You'd either have to have them growing out of your hands or have one on your forehead," she remarked sardonically. "No other way you could fuck both of us at once while we were like this."
He sighed. "Guess not. Sure does something to a guy to have two steaming cunts where he can reach them at the same time, though. Makes him greedy as hell!"
Kim snorted. "When's the last time you weren't greedy anyway?" But her voice softened and throbbed with affection for him. "Come on, love. Quit stalling. You're just trying to keep me from feeling left out. You know you're going to wind up fucking Anne." She had trouble keeping her words steady, her body jerking spasmodically as I continued to suck.
But I relaxed my grip and gulped for breath. "Kim-Kim, honey! Let me keep sucking your pussy while Blaine fucks me!"
"Brrr! Would you, Anne?"
"Come on! I want to!"
Blaine acted relieved at my offer. "She's even a better sport than we ever did hope!" he exclaimed to his wife. "And gutty as hell!"
He withdrew his hands from our pussies and moved around my raised leg. With his knees on either side of my hips he lifted my ass and inched against me, sticking his cockhead into the depression surrounding my cunt. I shuddered and gave a sigh of pleasure at the hot, intimate sensation. And Kim pushed herself half-erect, clutching at my boobies and letting her pussy rest on my mouth. Blaine lunged, his cock plowing the length of my hungry vagina with one powerful, plunging stroke. I yelled my delight and grabbed a great mouthful of Kim's pussy, my tongue thrust into her cunt and my lips sucking in the tissues around it. I managed to gather masses of her membranes, and I chewed fiercely on them while I sucked. She began to shudder, one spasm of trembling following another while her fingers rolled my nipples.
Blaine pumped at my pussy, his cock a powerful piston in the barrel of my vagina and his belly blasting the broad surface my outspread thighs made of my pussy. It was a wild, exhilarating experience for me. I couldn't have imagined such pleasure out of a situation involving more than two people. And I'd never have believed I could feel such affection for another woman or cooperate with her in a sex game. Having Blaine's cock in me wasn't going to cure my distrust immediately, but for the moment the distrust simply served to intensify the excitement of getting fucked by him.
For the first time, I caught a glimpse of a wall mirror and realized I could take in the whole scene. But it was almost too late. I was already hovering on the verge of orgasm and I knew by the frantic movements of the two bodies so intimately locked to mine they were, too. But I did see Blaine catch his wife by the shoulders and crush his mouth to hers in a savage kiss, even as they both went rigid in their climaxes. And as I watched their frenzied gulping the knot in my belly erupted and my own massive contractions milked Blaine's jetting cock and hurried the flood of hot cum that pooled in the heart of my vagina.
When our orgasmic rigidity melted the other two untied me. One on either side, they clutched me and fondled me, laughing with the happiness of complete abandon and making me feel like a royal princess.
"Oh, Anne, darling! We're so glad you're going to be one of us! And you'll love it!" Kim's mouth covered my shoulder and breast with wet kisses.
"How about it, puss? Fun?" asked Blaine.
"I was scared half to death," I admitted. "Being tied up like that is a traumatic experience! Especially with a couple you've hardly gotten to know!"
"Pretty brutal," Blaine agreed. "Made it that much more exciting, though, didn't it?"
I had to laugh at his earnestness. "Yes. After I gave up and made the most of it."
I wasn't very dignified. The sensation of being sandwiched between two such delightful bodies as Kim's and her husband's-and having them so eager and enthusiastic-made me a lot more responsive than normal. And it wasn't long before we were tumbling over each other like three kittens in a litter. The fascinating challenge of satisfying the hungers of three people at once drove us into unbelievable gymnastics and I panted as hard from the mere physical exertion as I did from sexual excitement. But there was no shortage of that. Every fiber in my body hummed tautly with my sex drive and I wallowed with the other two trying to absorb the maximum pleasure all at once.
"Once in a while," Blaine said, sounding a little awe-struck, "when we're all feeling no pain, John and Rose and Kim and I all pile up like this. Too strenuous to do it very often. But, God, what a wild orgy it's going to be with five!"
His mention of John touched me off again and I was the most primitive, lustful creature I could have been for the next half-hour. But we were totally exhausted by the time it started to get light outside, and they walked back to my rooms with me so we could get an hour's sleep before it was time to get up.
And as they left I looked after them. Maybe Blaine wasn't really so bad after all. A person did have to make allowances for people with as much creative genius as he had.
CHAPTER TEN
I overslept in the morning. My douche and hot shower had drained me of the last shred of tension and I'd gone to sleep confident there wouldn't be any "haunting". I suppose I'd sunk into my deepest sleep when the alarm rang; the fact is I let it run down without stirring.
And I awakened to look up into Rolf's broadly grinning countenance. A light breeze played over me and I discovered I was spread-eagled on my bed, my sheet no longer covering me. Rolf bent over and fondled my boobies.
"ROLF! FOR GOD'S SAKE!"
"Boy, do you sleep sound!"
"GET ME UNTIED! THIS INSTANT!"
"Aw, Mom! You said I could do this sometime!"
"I did not! Even if I had, this wouldn't be the time!"
"Aw, gee, Mom!"
"Honey, look at the time! I've got a job I've got to do! If I don't, we're not going to be here long."
A thrill of apprehension raced over me and goose bumps rose on my skin. Rolf had taken advantage of my exhaustion to do a first class job of tying me; if he refused to release me there wouldn't be any way to force him. I realized belatedly he'd even put one of the thick sofa pillows under my ass so my belly and my pussy thrusted upward for his easy access. The way his cock was quivering the sight must be exerting a powerful effect on him and I felt a jolt of excitement, myself, as I imagined him mounting me. But I did have to get downstairs, and I had to convince him without a show of crude authority.
"Look, honey, please? Let's postpone it until I can enjoy it, too. All right?"
"When?" He was plainly suspicious and reluctant.
"Well...." I sensed he wasn't going to buy anything vague. I was going to have to set a specific time. And it was probably going to have to be soon enough he could resign himself to the wait. "This afternoon? After work?"
"In our time, Mom?"
"Right."
"Like this?"
"Rolf...." Hell, what choice did I have? "If you want to. If you'd rather have it this way than any other."
"You're promising?"
"Promise."
He laid his hand on my pussy and squeezed gently, a regretful sigh escaping. "Okay, Mom. If you're sure."
"I'm sure. Now, let me up or we won't get any breakfast. And it's Maria's turn to cook again today."
Maria had done her usual superb job of preparing the meal. I ate hungrily, although I did manage to catch the girl's attention and fix her with a grim stare meant to convey the idea I wasn't going to overlook the degrading situation she'd subjected me to during the night. But her expression was as bland as if she had no knowledge of the crypt or the compound.
If her act had fooled me, her comment when she brushed past me while clearing the table would have reassured me I was right.
"See Lolita last night?" she asked.
"Not really. I couldn't see anything for quite a while."
"Oh. Anne, you ought to go to the snakes. Maybe they'd give you some kind of sign. Lolita loved them."
I choked with fury at her brazen insolence. But her next remark chilled me.
"Maybe you shouldn't, though. That's how she got her revenge on Jennifer."
And not with defanged rattlers, either, I reflected. I felt a sinister warning in her whispered asides and resolved to force her into the open while I was still alive to do it. But the others were already leaving the dining room; I'd have to wait for the right time.
Blaine was going out after another addition to his collection. Rolf begged permission to go with him and got it. Rose announced she was nearing completion on the poem she'd been composing for the past week and Kim lazily admitted she meant to sleep. But as I crossed the courtyard toward the library I noticed Blaine had paused to talk to John.
They turned to me as I approached.
"Understand you had a rough night," John said quietly.
"In the compound, you mean?" I asked. "Yeah. Somebody gave you a scare, Blaine says."
I nodded. The sympathy in his tone threatened to destroy my composure. "It scared me terribly," I told him in a low voice. "What happened was bad enough. But it didn't really hurt me. For a while I thought something a lot worse than that was going to happen."
He nodded. "I'm not going to stand still for that kind of thing around here." He was suddenly grim. "Maybe you've been seeing things that were real, instead of having trouble with nerves."
"I'm not a very nervous woman, John. I don't go around imagining things."
Blaine grinned faintly. "She's got a pretty strong grip on reality, all right."
John chuckled. "Takes things as they come?"
I know I blushed, because both men laughed. But it was a kind, affectionate laugh, and I knew I needn't worry about Blaine. I'd been terribly wrong about him.
"Let's see if our ghost messed around in the library," suggested John. He opened the door and led the way inside.
The window overlooking the garden was open and the little lantern was in its place. The two men exchanged significant glances.
"By God, there's no way that could happen except somebody hiding in here while we locked up. Or...." John paused.
"Or a secret door," added Blaine. "Like some of those old stories said."
John nodded. It was obvious he was growing angry. "There's only two possibilities. Somebody in this house is bugging you or we've got an outsider we don't know about."
"Nobody I know from outside cares enough to think of planning a thing like this," I said.
He nodded. "They wouldn't have any way to know about the construction of the house, either. So it's an insider. You figure it could be Blaine or Kim?"
"I did. I thought Blaine might be mixed up in it." I put out my hand quickly and laid it on Blaine's arm. "I'm sorry, Blaine. I just didn't know you well enough. I trust you now. I know neither you nor Kim is involved, honey."
He patted my hand and grinned. "Don't feel bad. If I'd thought about it I might have put you in the compound, myself. That was one hell of a sight, baby."
John seemed to be only half-listening. He mused. "Rose was in bed with me. I'm afraid we didn't hear anything at all. And we missed out on all the fun afterward. So that leaves Rolf and Maria. What about Rolf, Anne?"
"I don't think it was Rolf. The night I saw the thing in the garden he came into my room right afterward; we'd both heard some kind of noise we couldn't explain. Besides, he didn't have that funny scent on him."
"Maria? Ever catch the scent on her?"
"No."
"Still, she could wash it off. Or it might not be on the person to start with. Look, we're going to declare a holiday. I'm going to find the secret door in this room if I have to knock holes in every wall to do it." The expression on John's face made it clear he was serious.
Blaine nodded. "I'm going out after that snake. I spotted it late yesterday afternoon and I'm determined to get it, but I'll get back as soon as I can to help."
John suggested I make an effort to keep track of what Maria did during the day. "She'll be in the kitchen for the next hour or so, but after that," he said.
Rolf changed his mind about going out with Blaine when he learned we weren't going to work on the manuscript. I knew he was hoping he'd have a chance to improve the schedule on our planned adventure. But I stayed with John while he began a methodical, unspectacular search for a secret entrance to the library. And Rolf hung around, restless and uncomfortable, swallowing frequently and watching me with a hungry light in his eyes.
When Maria came into the courtyard I explained to Rolf I had some work I had to do, regardless of the holiday. And I went to my rooms after Maria had reached hers. Poor Rolf wandered disconsolately after me and yielded reluctantly to my insistence on privacy.
It wasn't easy to maintain surveillance on Maria's door without being obvious. Her apartment was just beyond Rolf's room and we were all three in the same wing of the quadrangle. But I kept my sitting room door open and moved my armchair close to it where I could see most of the arcade. And as I could see the main stairway there wasn't much she could do without my being aware. Of course, I had to move a small end table beside the chair with papers so I'd have something to do-after all, I'd made that excuse to Rolf.
When I did see Maria, it was only for a moment and she didn't go to the main stairs. I heard her, first, walking quietly along the arcade toward me. I caught a glimpse of her and then she appeared to turn toward the wall. And I didn't hear her footsteps any more. I waited. It seemed to me she was spending an awful lot of time at a blank wall, and the thought struck me abruptly that that was the blank wall with the hidden stairs behind it!
I sprang to my feet and peeked around the doorjamb. As I expected, Maria was nowhere in sight. I tiptoed into the arcade and immediately saw the opening to the stairs, which ran down between my sitting room and Rolf's room. Removing my shoes and carrying them, I hurried down the stairs, knowing Maria had gone ahead of me. Even with the opening, they seemed dark and threatening and I slowed as I approached the narrow landing halfway down.
The ambush at the crypt the night before was clear in my mind as I stopped on the landing. Maria could be waiting for me to come around the wall, just as she'd somehow been waiting in the crypt. I nearly panicked, but bracing myself with the thought I'd be ready for her this time and raising the shoes to use as weapons if I needed to, I edged around the corner.
To my relief, the lower flight of stairs was empty. And it was open at the bottom. I ran down, catching myself at the bottom and peering into the ground floor arcade before stepping into the open. Maria was nowhere in sight. I'd lost her by sitting complacently in my sitting room while she slipped away.
But at least the stairway was open! The armor was gone and I could see no trace on the floor of bolts or concrete for holding it. I turned toward the library door excitedly.
"John!" I called to him as I ran. "John! Come quick! The stairs!"
I ran into him at the door.
"Hey! Whoa! What's all the excitement?" He laughed and caught me. "And why the shoes in the hand?"
"John! Honey! The stairs I used the other day! The ones behind the armor! They're there again! Come on!"
We were less than twenty feet from the opening.
He held my hand and walked to it with me. And all we saw was the niche with the conquistador in it.
"NO!" I couldn't believe my eyes. "NO, JOHN! For God's sake! Maria just came down those stairs and I came down after her! John!"
He laughed. "Easy, easy! Look, if you say they were there, then they still are! Don't ask me how; I'd bet the royalties on my last book there was no way to move that suit of armor. But there's no doubt in my mind we've got secret passages here in the Casa. So this is one of them."
"Maybe the upstairs end is open," I suggested.
John doubted it and I had to agree. But I did go up to find out. And when I discovered the wall blank and unmarked all the way from my sitting room door to Rolf's door I leaned over the rail and called down to John. He came out of the library again and listened to my report.
"Okay. It's closed and we don't know how to open it. When Maria shows up, I'm going to have a word with her. By God, I'm not going to have her wandering around here in secret passages I don't know about."
He went back into the library and I examined the wall again for some sign of a door. I couldn't feature how adobe construction could be made part of a hidden door, but as I explored the surface more carefully I realized it was marred by numerous natural cracks. Almost any one of them could be the edge of the closed portion. And it occurred to me Rolf might get a thrill out of helping me search.
I stuck my head inside his room and called to him. To my surprise, he wasn't there. The bathroom was open and I crossed the room to see if anything was wrong with him, but he wasn't there either. A chill of intuitive dread settled over me. He'd come upstairs with me. He'd gone into his room sulking when I'd insisted on privacy. I'd watched the arcade-and the main stairs-too closely for him to have slipped away without my knowing it. The only time I hadn't been watching had been while I was going down the secret stairs. And he couldn't possibly have gotten to the main stairs and down them and out of sight during that brief period.
I went to the window and leaned out. Nobody could have climbed up or down that outside wall. Nor was there any indication anything had hung over the sill as a makeshift ladder. If he'd gone out the window, he'd jumped. But I couldn't believe he'd have jumped into the cactus bed at the foot of the wall.
My son was missing, that was all. He'd been in his room and he couldn't have gotten out without my knowing it. But he was gone. I raced back to the arcade and shrieked for John. He appeared at once, alarm showing clearly in his face.
"What's wrong, Anne?"
"Rolf's gone! He can't be, but he is!"
"WHAT!" He leaped toward the main stairs. "I'm coming up!"
When he got upstairs he made me explain what convinced me Rolf hadn't simply left his room for something to amuse himself. When I finished, he stroked his jaw reflectively.
"Sounds right. Still, we ought to ring out the other possibilities. Couldn't he have gone from his room to another one on this floor maybe?"
"He could have gotten to Maria's apartment without my seeing him. Of course, he might have gotten anywhere on the second floor while I was on those stairs. But he'd have had to run."
John grinned. "What's to keep him from running?" He glanced toward Rose's studio across the courtyard.
I had to giggle. "I don't think he'd be that shy about it. But we'd better check."
But Rolf was nowhere on the second floor. John woke Rose, who was in their bedroom rather than her studio.
"Not here," she mumbled. Then, as she shook off her grogginess, "Sorry. That damn poem made me so sleepy I decided to follow Kim's example. No, I haven't seen him. If I had, I'd have him here in bed with me." And she grinned in a highly unpoetic way. "Hey! Maybe he's in bed with Kim! I told him I thought she might put out if he went right up and asked her."
Kim awoke more slowly than Rose had. She laughed when she finally realized what we were asking. "Sure I would! In a minute! But he hasn't asked yet." And she sighed.
I felt my shoulders sag. He wasn't anywhere on the second floor. Neither was Maria, of course. But the other two women were thoroughly aroused and searched the ground floor and the basement hastily. Rolf simply wasn't to be found. And neither was Maria.
John fumed. "Where the hell could he have gone! We know Maria came downstairs. She could have gone outside. But where can that kid be!" And then, decisively, "He's got to be in some passage. Leave it to a boy; if there's something like that around and anybody finds it, he will."
"But you didn't," Kim reminded him. "You grew up here and you didn't even believe the passages existed."
"Maybe that was the problem," he growled. "I didn't believe there were any."
"Nobody said anything to Rolf about passages," I remarked. "At least not in so many words. We did talk about where that thump we heard could have come from, but neither one of us said anything about secret passages."
"You wouldn't have to," John replied. "But what's this business about a thump?"
I told him.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me before?"
"The owl. I knew you'd think all the rest was as silly as that."
"Ouch! Okay, you were probably right. Anyhow, the thump came from the stairs. And Rolf got to thinking about it and decided there had to be a space in the wall. He found one and is exploring."
"No! Oh, no, John! His flashlight is on his dresser! I saw it!"
"Oh, shit! He's shut in somewhere without a light!" He ran toward the library.
By the time we'd caught up with him, he was leaning out the garden window with a rifle. He fired three evenly spaced shots into the air and turned to place the gun back in the rack.
"That's our signal for trouble," he explained to me. "Need something that'll get attention when you're as isolated as we are."
"So Blaine will hear that and come back?"
"Right. Now, let's get busy finding a way into those passages."
"Rolf found one in his own room," observed Rose. "Some of us had better start looking there."
John agreed. He was going to continue the search in the library, but we certainly ought to start on Rolf's room without any further waste of time. Through the window, I saw Blaine running from the direction of the compound. I drew John's attention to him.
He leaned through the window again and shouted. "Hey, Blaine! Rolf out there?"
"No. He decided not to go!"
"Okay. Thought he might have changed his mind."
"What's the matter? I heard the shots while I was in the compound with that new rattler."
"Looks like Rolf's found the way into some secret passage and got himself shut in. No lights with him. We've got to get to him!"
Blaine started sprinting and in a moment was hauling himself through the window. John went into more detail about the events of the past hour.
"Maria's gone, too?" asked Blaine with a suggestive grin.
John grinned, too, and shook his head. "Yeah. But she came downstairs. And Rolf didn't."
"Too bad. Thought maybe Rolf had found the key for her chain and they'd sneaked off for some privacy."
John shrugged. "They wouldn't. All the privacy they'd need right in her apartment-or his room. Anyhow, you didn't see her either?"
"No, come to think of it. If she went outside, she didn't go toward the compound."
Or the crypt, I thought. He'd have seen her if she had.
I went upstairs with Kim and Rose to search Rolf's room for a secret door. The two men stayed in the library. Every minute that passed made the lump in my belly hurt more. I could picture my son, huddled in absolute darkness, surrounded by the earthy scent of hollow, adobe walls and the dust of years, fighting the terror of being trapped and helpless. He'd have tried to find a way out, I supposed. He'd have crept along blindly, feeling his way and hoping there would be an opening at the other end.
But how extensive would the passage be? Where-in this old fortress-would such passages lead? What deadly hazards would the darkness conceal until it was too late to avoid them? What if he were lying at the bottom of a shaft right now, broken and dying while we hunted vainly for a way to get to him?
Kim muttered. "If I ever get my hands on that kid sister of mine I'll kick the shit out of her!"
For an instant I felt a surge of anger. She'd have to get to Maria fast if she wanted to do that before I got to her. But I realized that might not be fair. "She didn't kidnap him," I said dully. "She's not big enough, for one thing. And she was downstairs. It wasn't Maria."
"Maybe not." Kim's tone was grim and unforgiving. "But she knew about the passages and didn't tell any of the rest of us. If we knew about them, we'd have Rolf out by now."
I couldn't deny that. "We wouldn't be looking for him if I'd let him in my sitting room," I mumbled half to myself. "It wouldn't have hurt anything."
Kim sighed. "You could at least have sent him over to our rooms. I'd have kept him out of mischief."
"Out of secret passages, anyhow," remarked Rose dryly. "Unless you call that thing of yours secret."
"Not me! Nothing secret about my pooky! At least he'd be where he could hear you yelling for him!"
Maybe he'd never hear us now, I caught myself thinking. After all, if he'd found an entrance here in his room he might have gotten into passages even Maria didn't know about.
There was a sound from the arcade. In a moment we heard Rolf's voice.
"Mom! Where are you, Mom?"
I couldn't say anything. I stumbled out of his room with Kim and Rose pushing behind me. Rolf was leaning over the rail shouting. I called out to him finally in strangled tones, just as the other two women shrieked his name. He whirled and leaped at us, letting us grab and hug him wildly. For a few minutes it was a sobbing, confused tangle, but Rolf quieted us and stood back, flustered and pleased-looking.
"Golly! Jeez, it was worth it! I'll take an hour or two in the dark any time for something like that!" Then, remembering, "Hey! Come on! Those stairs!" He turned toward the wall and an expression of disbelief spread over his face. "Mom! They're gone again!"
"Stairs! What about the stairs?" I demanded.
He grinned apologetically. "Well-well, Mom, I thought it would be all right. Maria came past my room and I thought she was coming to talk to you. Only when I peeked out she wasn't in sight and you were walking right into the wall. So I waited a minute and then followed you. I mean, if you were going down those secret stairs with your shoes in your hand something was up!"
"You followed me?"
"Yeah. You were already out of sight when I got to the opening, but I figured you weren't very far ahead. Just when I got on the landing, everything started closing up. Jeez! I went the rest of the way down as fast as I could, but it was too late! And there I was, and it was dark, and-and...." Remembered horror silenced him. His eyes widened and looked haunted. He whispered. "Oh, boy, that was awful! Black! And that funny, perfumy smell! And then that other smell-sort of dusty and dead and old. I thought-I thought...." He shuddered and looked nauseated. "I thought maybe it would be months before those stairs opened up again!"
All of us caught at him. We sobbed against him and mothered him, and I don't know how much was mothering and how much was something else.
John and Blaine had heard his first shouts and they reached us at about that time. They helped quiet the hysteria and listened while Rolf repeated his story.
"I'd made up my mind I was going to starve to death in there," he told them then. "I knew I'd been in there at least a whole day! And then all of a sudden the doors opened up! Boy, I got out fast!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was obvious Rolf was shaken by his experience. John drew me aside.
"See if you can't get him settled down, Anne. He's had a rough time. The rest of us are going to look for Maria."
The way he said it made me glad I wasn't Kim's sister. Rolf acted a little punch-drunk and didn't immediately respond to the loss of his audience, but I guided him gently into my sitting room while the others scattered to find the missing girl. When we were alone, my son's composure broke. For a time he was again my little boy. And I cuddled him as I had in the past, his cheek pressed to my breast as I stood beside the chair he'd sagged onto.
His arm finally slid around my waist and he hugged me, his grip steady. "Glad that's over, Mom," he murmured.
"Me, too! I was scared to death for you!"
"My own fault. Dumb!"
"Why?"
He made a chuckling sound. "Thought I was smart. Figured maybe I'd catch up with you where we'd be all alone. You know."
I did know. He'd hoped-in the innocent optimism of his youth-that if he caught me alone and where interruption was un-likely, I'd be easy to persuade. The notion piqued me. At the same time, as I recalled what I'd promised him for the afternoon, his restless hunger for me aroused a responsive tingle of desire. It would have been an intense experience for both of us. The thrill of having my son make love to me again would have combined with the scary excitement of a secret passage to magnify every sensation. I shivered and unconsciously pressed my belly against his chest.
He didn't miss the significance of the sudden pressure. His free hand went to the back of my thigh and slid up it gently to rest on one asscheek. I flinched, driving my groin against him, and he squeezed the tense mound.
"Rolf! Behave yourself!" I exclaimed with abrupt breathlessness. "For heaven's sake!"
Impudently, he caressed the back of my thigh again. The arm that barred the small of my back frustrated my effort to twist away and he grinned up at me when I leaned back to frown at him. Thrusting his head forward, he deliberately rubbed his face on my breast. My relief at his safety must have combined with the wildly unconventional things I'd experienced in the previous few days to put me on edge. His caresses and the sudden nuzzling of my breast aroused a fierce hunger in me and made me clutch at him in involuntary desire.
Before I could curb that gesture, he ran his hand up the back of my leg under my skirt. As he fingered my buttocks through my panties I felt myself going to pieces. After all, I thought confusedly, why not! He's got to forget about what it was like there in the dark!
Rolf was quiet and thoughtful. The quick eagerness of his fingers lessened and with an affectionate squeeze he withdrew his hand from under my skirt. I tensed briefly; he surely hadn't abandoned the assault so easily. I wondered if I'd upset him by being too ready, if lack of resistance had dried up his appetite. But the fact was he'd stopped the devastating caress and my reason was regaining a footing. I hugged his head and bent to kiss his hair. A woman couldn't have asked for a son any more deserving of her love than mine.
"You could relax a whole lot better in the armchair," I murmured.
"I suppose."
His arm loosened and I stepped back, expecting him to get up. My typing chair was too small for him for one thing. Lean as he was, he filled the seat from side to side. And the back rest looked ridiculously undersized. He let his arm slip, then caught my hips with both of his hands. With a quick, fluid movement, he drew me to him again. And I was so off balance I was helpless to prevent his wedging his knees between mine so I straddled his lap. I held myself on tiptoe momentarily, gasping at his impudence and the treacherous attack. Then I sagged, the strain of standing seeming more than it was worth. And he cupped his hands at my buttocks and dragged me up his thighs until my pussy ground on the bulge of his trouser covered hard-on.
"Rolf, you're awful!"
"Mmmm! Doesn't feel awful to me!"
"Damn it, it doesn't to me, either! But you're terrible!"
In spite of myself, I had to jerk my hips. My pussy dug at his hidden cock and a sharp sensation of pleasure warmed me. Rolf's hands worked up my back and settled between my shoulder blades. He moved one to the back of my head and drew my face close to his. For a moment we were still, our mouths almost touching and our breath mingling. Then his wet young lips touched mine and a sea of desire burst upon me. I crushed my mouth on his and flung myself against him. I was giddy with greed as I gulped at his kiss. My tongue explored his lips and, when they parted, drove into his mouth with desperate urgency.
I felt his body go taut with surprise. His hips rose sharply and his hands tightened. He swallowed hard and sucked at the intruding tongue. But he adjusted rapidly. His own tongue drove past mine to fill my mouth and his hips began to undulate. The hard ridge of his cock rubbed on my clitoris and inflamed me with fierce heat. I heard myself whimper, deep in my throat, and recognized a new kind of response. The recent sex I'd enjoyed had done something to me; I had loosened up and was ready to throw myself into the experience without reservations or reluctance.
"Honey, I. love you," I whispered past his lips and around his tongue.
He pushed me back and laughed: "Huh? Talking with your mouth full, Mom! Couldn't understand you!"
"I said I love you, you damn smart aleck!"
"Oh! Good thing, after all these years." Coolly, he reached for the top button of my blouse.
Nettled by his flip attitude, I jerked his hand away from the button. He grinned hugely and pretended to try to evade my hands. It was the sort of mock wrestling we'd done under far different circumstances when he was younger. And I couldn't help giggling as we thrust and parried. He caught my wrists and held my hands still, at length, and laughed happily.
"Give up?" he asked.
"Of course not!" I wrenched against his grip. "You'll be sorry," he warned me.
It was my turn to laugh. But he pushed my arms behind me and captured both wrists in one hand. Calmly, paying no attention to my struggles or protests, he began to unbutton the blouse.
I would have undressed for him if he'd asked; I wouldn't even have argued. But finding myself helpless to prevent him from undressing me aroused a reaction I didn't know how to cope with. Where I would have been calm and reasonably self-possessed while taking off my own clothes, I jerked furiously at my imprisoned wrists and twisted my hips and shoulders violently to evade his fingers. Each button that popped free of its buttonhole and let my blouse sag open a little further made me flame with embarrassment and mangled dignity. And I became excruciatingly conscious of my position, my legs separated by his and dangling toward the floor while my pussy rode on the cylinder of his cock.
The more conscious I became of our lewd interlocking the more every point of contact stimulated my excitement and desire. And when he had unfastened the last button and leaned back to survey me, I sagged against the hand that held my wrists and panted loudly.
"Oh, you rat! You rat, Rolf!" The words were there, but the tone was a plea for more rather than an expression of contempt.
And he grinned with delight. As if he were removing the peeling from some piece of fruit, he casually pushed my blouse off one shoulder and then the other. The material fell away from my torso and settled down my arms.
He studied my boobs and shook his head. "How come bras are so tight, Mom?"
I glanced down involuntarily, embarrassed at the frank question. The cups had no room to spare; smooth, creamy flesh bulged at the edges and stretched the seams. The problem, of course, was my excitement. The trembling mounds had already swollen with it and I knew how my nipples must be pressing against the confining material.
"It's-it's just the way they fit," I told him weakly.
"That's cruel!" His eyes danced with glee as he reached behind me and disengaged the hooks.
The bra popped free, springing away from my boobs and letting them settle into their natural shape. With his grin growing, he deftly lifted the garment and passed it over my head. While it fell to join my blouse, he contemplated the huge globes. I cringed under his scrutiny, then lowered my head to watch with him while the nipples slowly thrust their way out of the pocket they'd formed for themselves in the softer underlying tissues. They looked like an erecting cock, telescoping into view on the swelling pads of the aureoles. And I was conscious of the halo effect of the filmy down that grew on the slopes around them.
Rolf continued to hold my wrists with one hand. He placed the other at the small of my back and bent forward so I had to lean back before his advance. He touched one nipple with the tip of his tongue, then the other. Smiling happily, he closed his lips on one and teased it with them, rolling it back and forth and worrying its tip with his teeth. I shuddered at the sharp needles of pleasure that spread through me. My breath came and went between my teeth, loud and insistent. And my hips worked slowly to rub my clitoris on his cock.
He played with my boobies for a long time. At first he seemed to be experimenting. He tugged at the nipples, caught them gently in his teeth, mauled them with his tongue and aroused them to their fullest, darkest state. But after a while he simply sucked a huge mouthful of one breast into his mouth and sucked on it, noisily as a young animal nursing. And he lost interest in keeping me helpless. I slipped one arm around the back of his head and clung to his arm with the other, unable to think of anything but the pleasure that was washing me.
The undulation of my hips grew increasingly powerful and excitement surged in me from my pussy. At length, my son seized my thighs and slid me backward toward his knees. I grabbed at his wrists and made a motion toward scrambling free. But he laughed and grabbed me, holding me in place with one hand and reaching into his pocket with the other. He had again trapped my hands and no amount of squirming seemed to loosen his grip. I was dumfounded to see him pull a length of thick nylon cord into the open until I recalled what he'd untied from my wrists and ankles in the morning.
"ROLF! What's that doing in your pocket!"
"Well-you know-I thought if I caught up with you in that passage, maybe...."
I groaned at his audacity. And knowing I couldn't defend myself, I submitted quietly to his lashing my wrists together behind my back. When they were secure, he helped me to my feet, holding me between his thighs while he unzipped my skirt. He showed immense enjoyment while he was working the garment over my hips. He did so at a pace that left no doubt he was making the most of the excitement anticipation breeds. But when the skirt had cleared my panties, he simply let go of it and allowed it to fall around my feet.
He let me stand quietly then. His hands resting lightly on my hips he ran his gaze repeatedly up and down my body, feasting himself like a glutton on the sight of the bulges and hollows. At last, he began to roll down the top of the panties. Again, however, he delayed the process. When he'd rolled them to where they exposed the bulk of my pubic hair and were tautly stretched across my buttocks, he stopped and made me turn slowly around while he studied me from all angles. I was numbed in terms of resistance; I was totally inflamed in terms of physical and emotional excitement. Awareness of his breathless excitement as he whipped himself into ever greater heights of lust by staring at me made me tremble with eagerness. And when he stopped my rotation and jerked the panties down my thighs I had to struggle to keep from thrusting my pussy toward him.
A gentle touch of his hand urged me to step out of the fallen clothes. He left my self-supporting hose where they were and pushed me back until he could once more wedge my knees apart with his. And he pulled me to him, pushing me onto his thighs. I found myself sitting almost on his knees, and he thrust them apart until the backs of my thighs rested across the fronts of his, my ass completely unsupported.
He reached under me with one hand to finger my pussy. My thighs tensed to raise my pussy and he dug his fingers into my slit, rubbing the pulsing flesh while I bounced up and down. I watched his face through a haze of passion. I saw the first flicker of a wide-eyed expression of inspiration when a new idea occurred to him. And I wasn't surprised when he made me stand and turn around.
He stood, himself, then, and hastily stripped. Seating himself immediately, he drew me backward onto his lap, astride him again. And with some awkwardness he managed to bend past me enough to lash my ankles together, crossed, under his legs. With a deeply satisfied sigh, he leaned back and pulled me back on him. When he spread his knees, my legs were pried widely apart and my pussy lay fully exposed. Only then did I realize he'd edged the chair into a position which directly faced one of the mirrors that flanked the fireplace. I gasped and turned my head away from the lewd picture I saw in the mirror. My thighs were obscenely parted, bulging where his pressed into the backs of my knees. My slit gaped open, pink and gleaming between the two strips of thick, honey-blonde pussy hair. And in the center of the wet flesh yawned the black maw of my vagina.
With one forearm pinning my elbows and drawing them toward each other behind me, my son thrust my breasts and belly forward to heighten the effect. His other hand went to my pussy, where his fingers traced paths along one pussy lip and back along the other. I couldn't have suppressed my growing excitement if I'd tried. My hips jerked and the imaged pussy opposite me leaped up and down. My boobies bounced and my belly writhed. I no longer tried to avoid seeing my reflection, but watched it with burning eyes and an open mouth.
But Rolf didn't restrict himself to fondling my pussy. He appeared to take delight in being able to handle me-in having the freedom to put his hand anywhere he wanted to. He abandoned my steaming pussy again and again to caress my belly or rub the inside bulges of my thighs or maul my boobies. And every new touch was a tongue of flame added to the fire of my lust.
In spite of his frequent excursions, he began devoting an increasing proportion of his time to fingering my pussy. Every jab of his fingers into the trough of my slit sent a powerful jolt of delight through me. When he started running one finger around the thick rim of my vagina I couldn't thrust myself hard enough onto the marvelous bluntness of the moving digit.
As my own movements became more agitated I grew intensely conscious of the heavy prod at my back. Rolf's youth and eagerness triggered a copious flow of the lubricating fluid men generate, and its slippery layers soon coated my back, his cockhead slithering in the quickly thickening wetness and arousing a curious, tingly excitement of its own. But when his thumb worked the hood of my clitoris back and began to rub the quivering little organ I went absolutely wild.
I arched myself and clamped my thighs on his until the muscles seemed to crack. I jerked my shoulders from side to side while my boobies leaped drunkenly. My ass lashed up and down uncontrollably and my bound feet jerked backward and forward under my son's legs.
"OMIGOD, HONEY! I CAN'T STAND SO MUCH!" I shouted through my panting. "FUCK ME! GET YOUR PECKER IN AND FUCK ME! NOW!" I lost track of time. My body churned with hunger for his cock and I continued to plead.
At last, when I was beside myself with frustrated desire, he let go of my clitoris and seized my waist. He raised me until his beautiful cock stood like a mast under my cunt. And he let me down on it, guiding me and letting me engulf the hot meat. I slid down the rigid shaft, watching with fascinated awe as the huge cylinder disappeared into me. And I groaned a guttural groan of pleasure as I felt the thick cockhead snuggle into the core of my belly.
The deep penetration and choking fullness at my cunt turned me into a savage. I jerked my thighs into powerful, ferocious action, flinging myself up the length of the stiff cock and dropping back on it in glorious, gut churning plunges. My ass slapped my son's thighs and his belly and made him grunt with every blow.
"HONEY!" My voice was hoarse, and the word jerked out explosively. "QUICK! UNTIE MY HANDS!"
He jerked the knot loose and I grabbed his knees, bending forward to give my hips greater mobility. Rolf groaned and slid one hand under my jerking belly and the other against my chest, above my boobies. He was taking advantage of every possible zone of contact, I told myself as he leaned over me so I struck his chest in my upward thrusts. He clearly wanted to extract every last drop of thrill from this fucking.
I drew a great, sobbing breath of surprise when he lurched to his feet. His hands supported my torso in a horizontal position, jutting out from him as if I Were dangling on the spear that was his cock. And he walked, each step jolting me, and swung me over the back of the armchair so my lower belly lay on it. When he removed his hands from under me I fell forward, ass up, head touching the seat cushion.
And Rolf began fucking with all the vigor he could muster. He clamped his big hands on my hips and pinned me tightly to the top of the chair back. His hips smashed back and forth and his cock blasted me brutally. When I thought he would surely come, he slowed the pounding and panted noisily.
"Jeez, Mom! Oh, what a tremendous feeling! I wish it never would end!"
"ROLF! ROLF, HONEY! DON'T STOP! FUCK, FOR GOD'S SAKE!"
But he lifted his legs out of the circle mine formed and, without letting his cock slip out of me, pulled first one knee then the other up so he knelt astride my ass on the back of the chair. He rode on the base of the cock that impaled me. And when he started to bounce, his entire weight drove the great piston downward.
"AGGHHH! EEEEE! NOW, NOW, NOWWW!" I yelled at the top of my voice as my own orgasm exploded in me.
"Not-yet!" Rolf grunted fiercely. "Wanta-keep-fucking-you! UNNHHH! CAN'T HOLD IT!"
His weight settled on me and his cock pulsed, his cum spewing into me in a flood of heat. I shook violently and my cunt clamped tightly on his young cock. His fingers bit into my ass and his thighs jerked against me. I held my breath while the ferocity of our climax subsided, then sighed deeply and collapsed.
"Omigod, Rolf, honey! Nobody ever fucked me that hard before!"
"I didn't know, Mom. I didn't know if it would work." He worked his legs off the back of the chair and leaned over me, lying on my ass with his cock still buried. His hands fumbled at my belly and groped until they closed on my boobies. He kneaded the inverted mounds affectionately while his belly crushed my buttocks. "I just didn't know! But I damn near fainted I came so hard!"
I felt a delicious lassitude settling over me and replied dreamily. "I came pretty hard, too, son. Pretty hard."
It was a little surprising to me, even doing as little thinking as I was, that my inverted position wasn't bothering my breathing. With my buttocks and the bony structure of my hips and thighs bearing my son's weight there wasn't anyone crushing my chest, though, and the back of the chair sloped enough so I wasn't hanging straight down. But I was utterly helpless. Rolf hadn't made any move toward letting me up and I didn't seem to have much leverage.
He chose that improbable moment to become quizzical. "You really do like to fuck, don't you, Mom?"
With the edge of my excitement blunted by such a fulfilling orgasm my urge to use the earthier words in my sexual vocabulary was gone. But I still did have a cock locked in my belly, and Rolf was young enough to escape the quick collapse of his hard-on with his climax-or maybe it was the position. Whatever it was, there was a stimulation at work I hadn't been aware of, and when he asked me that kind of loaded question and used that powerful word an amazing new surge of excitement ripped through me. I probably answered more warmly than I would have under most circumstances.
"Mmmm! Love to!"
"Didn't have a whole lot of chances while I was growing up, did you."
"You were more important, honey."
"I'm glad I get to make it up to you a little bit."
"I don't think I ever hoped you would. I got a bonus."
"It sure was over fast."
"It's always over too soon."
"Mom?"
"Hmm?"
"I was just thinking. It's still almost an hour and a half until lunch. Wouldn't you like to get that promise out of the way?"
"What promise?"
"The one you made this morning."
"ROLF! Now see here!"
Even as I reacted to his proposition he gathered my arms behind me and tied them. Without listening to my objections or noticing my struggle, he tugged his cock free, picked me up, and hoisted me onto his shoulder. Grabbing his trousers and one of the couch cushions in his free hand he carried me out of my sitting room into the arcade toward his own bedroom. I was horrified, hanging head down, to see John and Blaine in the courtyard, but they were too engrossed in their conversation to look up.
In his room, Rolf dumped me on the bed, placed my hips on the cushion, and untied my ankles. He quickly secured them in a fully spread position, then untied my wrists and finished spread-eagling me. I lay face up, my pussy upthrust by the thickness of the cushion and gaping because of the separation of my legs. Rolf at once began teasing my clitoris, and when my excitement had overcome the relaxing effect of my recent orgasm, he settled down to patient, happy caressing of my entire body.
I couldn't do anything to stop him or resist my own response. After that first warm-up, using clitoris massage, the stimulation was gentle and leisurely, but there wasn't a moment when I wasn't getting a little more excited. My son had satisfied his own initial hunger, too, and he found time to try whatever came into his imagination. He seemed fascinated by his ability to arrange me in whatever position he might think of-and in my utter inability to do anything but protest.
In the end, though, he returned me to the original spread-eagled sprawl and mounted me. And I came as hard as I had the first time, still loving the young cock and the enthusiasm that pistoned it in me as much as ever.
And I had no desire to contradict him afterward when, his sweating belly pressed to mine and each hand cradling one of my boobies, he made a prediction.
"Mom, we're going to fuck each other a lot, aren't we?"
Unless his interest could be diverted, I knew I was going to be helpless to refuse his kind of sex. Our temperaments just matched too well for me to resist him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When we went to lunch we found Maria had prepared it. John told me quietly she'd appeared shortly after Rolf had escaped from the secret stairs.
"She's going to show me the passages after lunch," he remarked. "Turns out she's the one who opened the entrances to the stairway for your boy. She was where she could hear me when I shouted to Blaine about Rolf's being missing."
"And she let us go on worrying?"
"We had a little chat about that, Maria and I."
But my anger melted when I saw the way she looked at Rolf. Her eyes wide and suffering, she seemed to envelop him in her gaze. And before he left the dining room she managed to pause at his elbow.
"Rolf? Are you all right, Rolf?"
He nodded and grinned. "Sure! Great!"
"God! I'd die in the dark that way!" She studied him and her voice was tender when she asked again, "You're sure you're all right? Rolf I wish I could make it up to you."
"You'll have plenty of chances," he promised. There was such a note of certainty in his voice I felt sure he knew exactly how. And I suspected I could guess what he had in mind.
Maria did show us the passages. Each of the sitting rooms on the second floor, including mine, had a set of controls for certain of the secret entrances. And every entrance was capable of being operated by at least two controls. One of the switches in Maria's apartment worked the openings for the stairway. But there was a control for those entrances in my sitting room, too.
The control assemblies were cleverly set into the mantels of the fireplaces, covered with inlaid panels that wouldn't have been suspected under any kind of scrutiny. The library and the living room downstairs had similar control centers, although they were more complete.
On the landing of the stairway, a well-concealed door opened into a separate passage that led directly into the library. And there was a branch of that passage Maria merely said led outside to a point well away from the house. Since her part in the kidnaping I'd suffered hadn't been mentioned I decided not to say anything yet, but I privately suspected that outside tunnel emerged inside the de Vasca crypt.
Curiously, the passages she showed us were all short and separate. Each led from one room to another, but there was no overall accessibility. I had a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as if I'd watched a puzzle put together only to find it had no pattern.
I excused that sensation on the basis of exhaustion. I was badly in need of sleep to replace the energy I'd spent under the firm direction of my son. And when I admitted that I was ready to collapse on my feet, nobody objected to my slipping away to my room for the sleep I desired so intensely.
I was confident I wouldn't be disturbed. Rolf had gotten more sex from me during the morning than he'd expected to get all day. The others were trying to reorder their concepts about the house on the basis of the passages Maria had shown them and weren't going to need me. Even in the protection of the thick-walled house, the heat of the day was appreciable and I was thankful to rid myself of my clothes and step again into the shower. After I'd toweled I threw myself on my bed and fell asleep.
I remembered thinking fleetingly about the "haunting". Maria hadn't admitted any of it, although her knowledge of the passages seemed conclusive to me. But nobody had openly accused her, either; my own intention had crumbled in the face of her concern for Rolf's well-being. So that issue had yet to be faced.
I more than halfway guessed the men had spoken with her about my experience in the snake compound, but even that was ignored while we'd looked at passages. The result was essentially that the one mystery I'd thought would clear up all the others had contributed hardly anything to the general solution.
When I awoke it was dark and cool. Nobody had come for me and I'd slept through the end of the day. A quick glance at the luminous numerals of my clock assured me it wasn't really late, though. They would all be moving about. I gave myself a few more seconds of lazy comfort before leaving my bed. And as I became more clearly aware of myself and my surroundings I stiffened in terror. Between my sprawled legs and tightly pressed to my pussy was a bulky, scaly mass that moved. Its slow, continuous slithering against the warm flesh of my twat and the dry friction on the inside curves of my thighs convinced me instantly it was a sizable snake. And the unmistakable shape of the blunt wedge that rested between my twitching pussylips established it as a rattler.
For an instant, fury throbbed in my veins at the thought anybody would bring one of the snakes from the compound into my room for such a grisly practical joke. Even as it formed, though, the notion evaporated. I knew my employers far too well to believe them capable of such a boorish action.
Either the rattler had reached my bedroom-and me on my bed-by itself through accident, or somebody had maliciously introduced it with something besides a joke in mind. Stop beating around the bush! I told myself. You know damn well who did it! That goddamn Maria is so locked-in to the Lolita legend she brought a rattler here to kill you! I hated myself for leaving such a deadly enemy the freedom of choice for such a vile trick. I should have faced her with my accusations!
But regrets and fury weren't going to get rid of the snake. He was real and he was a killer. Maria wouldn't go to the trouble of bringing a defanged rattler to my room. After my experience in the compound I wasn't likely to get very upset by a single member of that collection. No! She'd have brought a deadly creature from the desert. And she'd be counting on my moving enough in my sleep to provoke it into a fatal attack or, failing that, to panic at the realization of my peril and accomplish the same result. In either case, she'd be rid of me and the threat I posed in connection with John Jacob Duncan.
With infinite care, I extended my arm beyond my head toward the switch for the night light. I prayed silently that the sudden illumination wouldn't aggravate my bed partner and twisted the switch. The broad, flat head left my slit momentarily while yellow eyes stared at the lamp and the thick, black tongue flicked back and forth. But the beast evidently dismissed the thought of danger. It nudged its head back into the wet crevice, thrusting my pussylips apart as it did so. And the nose bore against my vagina.
The sudden violence of the physical pleasure the action aroused terrified me. My hips had flexed involuntarily at the pressure and friction and all my awareness of danger hadn't helped me forestall the reaction. I gritted my teeth and whimpered.
But I had apparently failed to close my sitting room door. I could hear voices coming through it-and through my bedroom door-in ordinary conversation. One of the voices was Blaine's.
"Hell, I'd like to help you, baby, but I can't. Not right now."
"Blaine! I always count on you! Why can't you?" It was that deadly bitch, Maria!
"Fact is, I caught that rattler I was after this morning. Just got it into the compound when John gave his rifle signal. Didn't have a chance to get the fangs out. I forgot this afternoon, but he and Don Juan-"
Maria uttered a startled shriek. "BLAINE! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You didn't!"
"Huh?"
"You left a fanged rattler in that compound?"
"Well, I mean, when that rifle went off-"
"OH, NO!"
Maria's racing footsteps burst into my sitting room and she sprang into my bedroom. My attention was on the quiet brute at my pussy and I didn't stir a muscle in response to her abrupt entrance. When Blaine appeared behind her in the doorway, I paid as little attention to him.
"ANNE! OH, ANNE! YOU'RE ALL RIGHT!" Maria looked ghastly with fright. "Don't move a muscle, Anne! Oh, Christ, Mrs. Kelig, don't even breathe!"
She seemed to glide toward the bed. I saw instantly she was placing herself in deadly danger. Moving, she'd draw the rattler's venom if he became alarmed. But she whimpered and came nearer.
"Oh, Anne!" She was whispering now. "Oh, Anne! Love of God, I didn't mean it to be real! Don't move, Anne! Please don't move!"
I think Blaine dragged his mind off my nakedness and onto Maria's actions at about the same moment as I realized what she meant to do.
He hissed at her urgently. "Jesus Christ, girl! You can't! Not with your hands!"
She lunged as the snake lifted his head. Her hands closed around the rattler's neck at the base of its jaw. Even as she grabbed, she threw herself onto the bed in a twisting fall that swung her arms into the air above her and placed her on her back, her head on my belly.
"Oh, shit!" Blaine flung himself forward and grabbed her hands in his. His forearms bulged with effort as the snake threw two coils around my thigh and jerked against the offending grip.
But with his knee now braced on the bed, Blaine thrust himself backward and heaved at the rattler. The coils slipped, then slipped further, and little by little Blaine and Maria pried him off me. Blaine's effort raised Maria to her feet and they faced each other, the heavy body lashing between them, then coiling and uncoiling around their arms. I rolled convulsively off the opposite side of the bed and crouched while I stared at the awesome struggle.
Blaine and Maria gazed into each other's eyes and Blaine's complexion turned suddenly gray.
"My God!" he whispered. "We've been had!"
The awful truth hit me as he spoke. His hands were closed like a vise around Maria's. It was she who held the snake, not he. And her strength was clearly no match for the fury of the rattler. The moment Blaine relaxed his grip the beast would twist in her hands and sink his fangs into her. If she tried to slip her hands free of Blaine's grip the same thing would happen.
Ignoring my nakedness I raced to the door, jerked it open and screamed. "JOHN! ROLF! JOHN! ROLF! QUICK! QUICK!"
Rolf burst out of his room and rushed toward me, his eyes bulging as he saw me. And I heard John shout to me from across the court.
"Mom!" Rolf reached for me. "What's wrong?"
"IN THERE, SON! IN THERE!"
He shoved past me and gasped. "MARIA! JEEZ, BLAINE! NO!"
The great, triangular head jerked from side to side. Its mouth gaped and two vicious fangs gleamed in the dim light. Rolf scooped my bra from the dresser, thrust one cup inside the other and leaped to the struggling figures. He slammed the cupped material onto the points of the rattler's fangs and onto them, the wicked weapons piercing the heavy material instantly. But he ignored them and hooded the massive head, closing the rims of the cups behind the bulging jaw and whipping the loose ends of the band around the head with sure strokes.
While Rolf clamped his hands on the back of the rattler's head, Blaine gritted his teeth and slid his hands off Maria's to grip the snake immediately behind her grip.
"Got him?" he asked Rolf with a grunt.
"Yeah! Tight!"
"Maria! Let go, NOW!"
Maria released her grip and threw herself back out of the way.
"Rolf! I'm going to shift my hold. You tell me when." Blaine gulped for air.
After a moment's silence, Rolf nodded. "Now!"
The snake gave a convulsive heave as Blaine's hands loosened, jerked upward and tightened again. The lean man sighed heavily.
"Got him, Rolf! Tie that band. Draw it as tight as you can!"
Rolf caught the ends of the band and slipped one over and under the other, then tugged fiercely, snugging the loops at the base of the mighty, hooded head. Without relaxing the tension, he completed another half hitch and jerked it tight. The bra-hood was on to stay. Only when Rolf fell back did I register the fact he was as naked as I. What struck me at once was that the exertion had stiffened his cock; it wasn't a full hard-on, but it was swollen and half-erect. And Maria stared at it with the unblinking, wide-eyed fascination of a woman who's never seen a cock before.
John ran in from the arcade. "What?" He saw the situation. "Oh, God! Need a bag, Blaine?"
"Yeah! In our sitting room! One of the big ones! Rolf, see if you can quiet this bastard a little while John's getting the bag. Get hold of his body."
The action seemed not to diminish. I had to fight myself to keep free of hysteria; I expected to see my son struck by those protruding fangs at any moment. But John returned panting with the bag and he and Rolf began stuffing the writhing body into it. The last of the drama was Blaine's quick thrust, driving the head into the opening and jerking his hands out of danger at precisely the right instant. Even as his hands emerged, John heaved the drawstrings tight and the snake was safely imprisoned.
Maria began to tremble violently. She sagged toward the floor. But Rolf caught her and pulled her tightly to him. She clung to him, sobbing wildly.
"Omigod!" she exclaimed through her sobs. "I nearly killed her! I-I brought him up here from the compound and let him loose in her room! I thought he'd been defanged!" She shuddered and pushed herself against the powerful, naked body, her face buried against his chest. "Oh, God, Rolf! I was wicked! I didn't want her to take John away! I wanted her to be so scared she'd rim! I had to make her think Lolita's ghost was angry at her!" She tipped her head back to look into his face. Her voice was low and clear when she continued. "Rolf, Rolf! I'd have lost you!"
He gulped and brushed her eyelids with his lips. "You didn't," he said softly. "And when you found out it wasn't defanged you were ready to let it kill you so it wouldn't kill Mom. I heard you and Blaine. I didn't know the snake was in here, but I heard you. And that's what you were talking about."
She nodded slowly. "I would have been a murderer. Murderers haven't any right to live."
From where I stood I could see how hard her belly was pressed on his cock. I saw the sudden tremor that seized her hips and the convulsive jerk against Rolf.
She stared into his eyes and a smile touched the comer of her mouth. "Rolf, will you let me go to your room with you?"
"Huh? You mean that?"
She nodded. "Now?"
He thrust his mouth onto hers and they swayed with the ferocity of their kiss. When Maria finally drew back she looked radiant.
"You're naked," she said in a low, vibrant tone.
"Huh? Yeah! I am!" He sounded genuinely startled.
"Rolf, darling, I will go with you the way you are. I'll be that way, too."
With her gaze fixed on the floor, Maria quickly undressed. Her dark skin gleamed, flawless and smooth. Full breasts swung gently with her movements. A tiny waist and rounded buttocks and long tapered legs quivered before Rolf and she finally looked up again.
"Quick, Rolf! I want you to have me!"
She leaned against him and he put his arm around her. The nineteen-year-old virgin and my fifteen-year-old son slipped quietly from the room. The two men sighed.
"By God, she's ready!" exclaimed Blaine under his breath.
John peered quizzically at me. "How about you, puss? You feel like a full member of the tribe?"
"Is Maria really ready to give up Lolita?" I asked hesitantly.
John grinned. "Know what? As far as she's concerned you can have all you want of me. She's just discovered it's going to take a while to get as much as she wants for starters of Rolf!"
"Did she do all those haunting things?"
He nodded. "Every damn one. She carried the lantern in the garden. She wore the chain and key and made that thump you heard by accidentally letting one of the secret doors bang. She even had a vial of a scent Lolita used to use. Nobody but Lolita knew what it was-she had it imported from Mexico City and wouldn't share it-but Maria put it in an atomizer. And one spray with that gave you something to sniff every time she had the ghost do anything."
"John, what happens to the conquistador when the door to the stairs is open?"
He chuckled. I felt a hard thrill to see he and Blaine were getting out of their clothes while he was answering my questions. "There's a section of the floor that's on a turntable. Whole thing revolves."
"How do you know all of this?"
"She told me right after supper. She didn't say anything about the snake, but she seemed confident you'd be leaving in the morning. And she wanted me to know she'd done the things to make you go. That was part of the role she thought she wanted to play."
"She's the one who took me down to the compound and left me there?"
"Yes. That branch passage from the library goes to the crypt. When she came out of it she saw you waiting outside. She came back for a snake bag and stuff to tie you with. She didn't know those snakes were quite as thoroughly trained as they were. She thought it would simply scare hell out of you to be out there until morning."
I sighed. "But she's all over that now."
"By the time she comes out of Rolf's room she'll have something else to keep her mind occupied. Wouldn't you say?"
"Yes, I would."
They were going to take turns with me, I decided. They both had magnificent cocks; looking at the two of them at the same time made me wish I could have both at once. But John had flung himself onto the bed and lay looking up at me. He was going to take me first. I was glad he was, since they were both there. I did love him so intensely!
I lowered myself over him, kneeling astride his hips and snuggling my cunt over his cockhead. Slowly, savoring the delicious sensation fully, I sank onto his cock and let him pull me to him. For a time it wasn't necessary to fuck; I could just lie on him with his cock buried in me and be happy.
The bed sagged and Blaine knelt behind me, his knees wedging between my calves and John's thighs. His hands closed on my buttocks and I wiggled and made a happy crooning sound. He was one in a million to caress me that way when John already had me on his cock. Something huge and round and incredibly slippery poked into the crack of my ass and pushed against my anus. I gasped and jerked, the truth suddenly, frighteningly clear.
"No, Blaine! Jesus God, Blaine, NO-NO-NO!"
"Easy, sweetheart," whispered John. "We wouldn't do anything to you, you wouldn't like."
I trembled violently, but John's arms held me tightly to him and Blaine's knees prevented me from straightening my legs or bringing them together. The great bulb nudged my rectum open and burrowed in. I shrieked at the agonizing, burning distension of my sphincter, but Blaine's knees had lifted with the terrible force of his slow thrust and he let me shove my legs back so they lay extended along John's. And my ass was abruptly relaxed and full and throbbing with pleasure.
Between the two men, their body heat shutting out the coolness of the night, I yielded to a new, glorious kind of fucking that left no sense unstimulated. My mind buzzed with the giddy swirling of my delight and I contentedly let myself float in a sea of undiluted excitement.
I'd found a home. My son had found a home, too. And in that home we'd found each other. What the future might hold, I didn't know. But it would be built on a present that was deliriously happy.
"Ooooh!" I whispered. "Ooooh, I do love you, John! And Blaine makes it so much closer a love!"
And John squeezed me and grunted. And Blaine grunted. And between them, I grunted loudest of all.
