In his book. Success in Marriage, Dr. Eustace Chesser writes: "Those who fail to make a success of one marriage, which is but another way of saying that they failed to achieve adjustment to one partner in marriage, seldom make a success of any further matrimonial venture. Whether or not they marry again, they are often sorry that their first marriage was broken up. This has been observed by divorce lawyers, doctors., psychologists, and others. Whenever a marriage fails, two people fail; and when they try again, they are attempting to succeed in something in which they have already failed." If there was a failure in Paula's marriage it would have to be inherent in the shameless demands made upon her by her husband, Bill. He sold huge insurance policies, but he used Paula for the real convincer. He didn't realize that when she left him he would never be the same.
CHAPTER ONE
She knew she was beautiful. Her lovely reflection stared back at her from the irises of Greg Prentiss's eyes. She could look into his heated eyes and find pictures of herself in all different poses as she shifted slightly in the rich leather of the booth. She even saw that he wished for nude poses, and that he wasn't sure yet that he would get what he wanted. "Paula?"
"Yes, Greg?" There was moody huskiness mellowing his voice, and this pleased her. He was such a big man, a large handsome specimen, and she wanted to laugh because she was seeing the uncertain little boy in him, the fiery desire that lurked close under his urbane exterior.
"How much longer, doll?"
"Greg. I don't know what you mean." This was a lie-another lie. She knew what he meant, all right.
He took up his drink and finished it off. He stared at her a moment in the darkness of the cocktail lounge.
Paula dampened her lips. For a moment it was as if they existed in a vacuum of silence. Then the sounds were unnaturally loud, the way they are when one is feverish. She wondered if she were feverish?
He dropped his hand to the leather booth-seat between them. He put it on her upper leg and pushed his fingers between her legs, moving them on the mound at her thighs.
"This," he said. He was husky, watching her, faced flushed. "This is what I want, Paula. This is what it's all about, isn't it?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." She tried to pull away in the narrow confines of the booth, but she couldn't quite make it.
"I want you," he persisted. "I want your clothes off of you. T want to look at you. I want you in bed. I want to make love to you."
"Nobody can accuse you of over-subtlety, can they?" She tried to keep her voice and her tone light. She didn't pretend she hadn't done exactly this sort of thing before, with other men, but never so abruptly. Forty-five minutes ago she had never even seen Greg Prentiss. She'd heard Bill talk about him, of course.
Oh, of course!
Greg moved his fingers on her, and she felt the warmth activating her thighs. He was handsome, well-groomed, nice-smelling, successful. The men Bill set her upon were often well groomed, successful, but seldom as handsome as this one. She told herself she should be pleased with this fringe benefit.
Still, she was beautiful. Bored photographers had attested to her glamour and loveliness before she became Mrs. Bill Mapes. This was some years ago. She was twenty-seven now, but she had seen the tributes paid her when she walked into this swank lounge to meet Greg. Eyes turned toward her, heads swiveled, people gawked, sophisticated people. She deserved more.
She sighed heavily, following Greg's gaze to the high-rise of her breasts. They were teen-age firm, matched, crafted, erect. Bill was proud of her breasts. Her husband told her they were icy-smooth and like a young girl's breasts. When she'd talked about having babies, he'd scowled, raging. "Plenty of time for that. Having babies will make those boobies sag, make you dumpy. There's no hurry for that, doll!"
Still, she wished she did have a baby, or even two. Things would be different with her and Bill then. She wouldn't be out like this with a stranger. His hand between her legs was melting her 'down. She wanted to resist, but the two drinks, the fevered excitement, the sense of wrong in all this, his knowing fingers, all worked against her.
She stirred languidly against the quiet leather. Her legs had parted slightly now, and Greg's ungentle fingers probed deeper, dragging her skirt higher on the heated expanses of her upper legs.
"Oh, don't," she whispered.
"Haven't you even heard what I've been saying?"
She put her head back, gazing at him sleepily. She shook her head. She may as well admit it. She hadn't heard a word.
"I said I could spend the night being subtle, but that isn't what I want. That isn't what either one of us want."
"How do you know what I want?"
She watched the small muscle in his squared jaw work slightly. He was extremely handsome angered like this. She felt a sudden urge to laugh at him.
"Must I remind you?" Greg said.
"Of what?"
For a moment Greg did not answer. He coldly caught the hem of her skirt and tugged it above her thighs. He slipped his fingers inside her panties.
She whimpered slightly, looking around frantically, but no one was looking at them. They could have been alone in some motel room, which obviously was the way Greg wanted it. She had the empty sensation that Greg could strip her naked and no one would even glance their way.
There was no way out of this, she thought anxiously, but then reminded herself, she'd known this even before she met him, hadn't she?
Of course she had.
Nothing was new about this except the man himself.
Greg was new, and she wondered if perhaps the fact that he was handsome, personable, forceful-all the attributes she found attractive-made her hesitate?
Under other conditions wasn't Greg the kind of man she could have loved, the sort she had once believed Bill was?
It was too late for any such thoughts-too late for thinking at all.
She said, smiling, "Remind me of what, Greg?"
"That you are the one who called me," Greg said coldly.
She bit her lip.
But he spoke again, the savagery boiling under the softness of his tone. "You telephoned me. You asked me to meet you. You promised-"
"I promised what?"
Suddenly he laughed, and his even white teeth gleamed in the darkness. "In words you promised nothing, except that you'd have a drink with me."
"Right." She nodded and tried to slide away from his fingers at her thighs. He was too strong for her, too knowing.
"All right," he said. "The promise wasn't in what you said, Paula, but in the way you said it."
"Couldn't you have misunderstood me?"
"I could have, but I didn't." His fingers probed, his hand moved. She felt her body betraying her, her hips sliding forward slightly toward that intoxicating movement of his fingers.
She was breathless. She regretted this because he would not miss her breathlessness, and it in itself was a kind of surrender. She said, "I've admired you-your voice over the phone. I-wondered what you would be like in person."
"Now you know," he said.
"Yes. Now I know."
She shivered slightly. He laid his head on the seat rest and kissed her throat, the caress of his lips moving up to her ear. He nibbled at the lobe. "Lord," he whispered. "You smell good. You taste good. How long are you going on teasing me?"
"Teasing you?"
"Stop it," he ordered. "You came here for the same reason I did."
"I told you. I came because you sounded interesting. I shouldn't have come. Just because I did, that doesn't mean I'm an easy roll-that all you've got to do is push me and I'll fall over on my back for you."
Now Greg laughed. His laughter had easy charm in it. "I never thought you were!"
"Didn't you?" She did move away now, but she felt chilled when his fingers no longer functioned. "You act like it. Your hands act like it."
His fingers pursued her, overtook her, resumed their drumming upon her bared nerves. Involuntarily she sank her head back and stared upward into the smoky darkness.
"In my anxiety I may have given you that impression. I'll restate it, if you'll let me." He moved closer and she felt the hardness of his big leg pressed against hers. With her eyes closed she could see how it would be in a bed for them, his big body, her small supple one, adjusting to him, manipulated, used, dominated.
She opened her eyes abruptly. "You're the loveliest creature I've ever seen," he said. "That's no line, or an overstated sales pitch. I'm serious. You are lovely. Nobody has to tell you. But you're hungry-maybe somebody needs to tell you about that."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't you?" She felt his insistent hand, and she tried to move away. But to her astonishment he let her go. She almost gasped aloud when he removed his hand and made no further effort to invade her.
Greg straightened slightly in the booth. She was struck again by his male ruggedness, the excitement of his broad shoulders and rigid muscles.
A chill rode his voice. "Maybe I'm wrong about you. All wrong. You tell me if I am."
Her breathlessness had increased. It was as if he had left her in a torture chamber. She felt the cold of the air-conditioning on her bared inner thighs. She pressed her legs together; nothing helped.
"Yes," she said.
"As I said, you're lovely. One of the loveliest brunettes ever assembled. Your breasts could drive an imaginative man insane-and I'm known for my overworking imagination. You've a mouth that's probably too large for your face, but your face would be less perfect without it. Those lips need loving, and they are capable of loving. Shall I go on? Your tapered legs, your taut, rounded hips-perfect female loveliness. Then what could you possibly be lacking? What do you need, what could a woman like you need?"
She tried to smile, failed. "Yes, what?"
"I think you know." The chill deepened and he said, "I'm sorry I wasted your time."
She stared at him, eyes wide. "What are you talking about?"
"You. Remember? I'm also sorry you wasted my time."
Paula shook her head helplessly. "Now I am lost. Now I don't know what you are talking about at all."
"You know, Paula. But I'll put it in words. You need something you're not getting with Bill Mapes. Now, I know Bill. Not well, but better than casually. He's as big as I am, as healthy, and better looking. But for some reason he doesn't give you what you need-not in bed, and not in a lot of other ways."
Her voice sharpened. "What do you know about it?"
His mouth twisted into a wry smile. "I know you are here. You called me. As I said, I didn't call you. If I'd had any idea what Bill had-what was boiling, waiting in that lovely body, I would have battered down walls getting to you. But I didn't know. Not until you walked in here. You are specially geared for everything, doll, for something you're not getting with Bill Mapes. And so you're here. And I'm here. But I didn't come here to waste my time with kid games."
"What does that mean?"
"It's plain enough. I'm married. Helen's a swell girl-she couldn't carry your pill-case, but she's nice, well-made, generous, mother of my children, and we get along. But I have needs that Helen wouldn't even understand. But they are needs that I'm certain you would know all about. There, can I say it any plainer than that?"
Paula met his gaze levelly. "It sounds as if you are using different words for saying we are a couple of alley cats."
He laughed, the sound so sudden and abrupt that people turned from the bar, smiling in empathy.
"Not at all!" Greg said. "It so happens that I don't believe that sex between two consenting adults is sinful. It is the loveliest gift that God ever bestowed upon human beings. It is beautiful, despite all puritanical attempts to make something filthy and forbidden out of it. But unfortunately, the need for sexual release and expression is inequitably distributed about among human beings, there are high needs and low needs. That's all. There are those-like me, and I believe, like you-else you wouldn't be here-who need more than a perfunctory roll in a bed once or twice a month. We need so much more! Others need less, their sex drive is sublimated in a thousand ways, spying on others, cheating others, defaming characters, stealing. But all of us are driven, and I believe the best creatures are driven to find each other-in the way that must have been intended from before time began."
She smiled, touching his hand. "You make a persuasive speech."
"I've given it a lot of thought," he said.
"And a lot of polish, with a lot of women, I'll bet."
He shrugged. "That, too. There are women whose needs match mine, exceed mine. I'm sorry if I wronged you--and you're not one of them."
Paula hesitated, lowering her inflamed body into the foam-stuffed seat before replying. She saw they had reached a crisis, the moment when it could end. He could walk away and she would never see him again, or the beginning of something frantic and fierce-and perhaps wrong, despite his comforting words.
She wanted suddenly to let him go. She needed to be alone because he had touched raw nerves: there was something badly wrong between her and Bill. It was nothing she would admit to this stranger, and yet it was staggering to think that he had diagnosed the ill so quickly and accurately.
She wondered what would happen if she said nothing and let Greg leave her here alone. She had only to remain rigid and withdrawn beside him and he would walk away. She would never see him again.
She would not miss him. Despite his male, rugged beauty and the forcefulness of his response to her beauty and his raging need to love her body, she had no wis!; for him.
But she could not let him go. What Greg didn't know was that she had been ordered to meet him like this, to accede to his wishes, no matter how strange and odd they might prove to be. She shuddered. Meeting him like this was all part of a game she was forced to play against her will. And it was a deadly game. Not for him-but for her.
Paula forced herself to laugh. She lifted her slender hand and dropped her pink-tipped fingers over upon his leg. She felt the rigidity of him, the steel-like readiness. She caught her breath involuntarily.
But he did not notice, because he caught his breath, too, when her hand closed on him.
"Suppose I admit you are right," she said in that breathless tone, "about my needs-the way I need something I don't get-what then?"
He reached over, caught her hip and slid her back against him. His hand covered her thigh, and his fingers moved, loving her.
He kissed the line of her jaw. "We quit talking," he said. "We do something about it."
"But this is all so-so quick," she said. "We don't even know each other."
"You know better. We do know each other. Right now, I feel I know you better than I know Helen after ten years with her. And I'm no stranger to you-not any more."
"No," she sighed in a fragile surrendering, "not any more."
She tightened her hand on him, somehow repelled and yet attracted mindlessly by the ruggedness of him. She moved her fingers, telling him without words that she was not going to resist him, not any more tonight.
A slight tremor wracked his huge body. He whispered hotly against her face. "Where, Paula?"
She hesitated, putting her head back and closing her eyes. She let his hand explore her.
"Let's get out of here," Greg said. "There must be a motel not too far away-"
"No, Greg. Please-"
"Now what?"
She moved closer, tightened her hand on him, but she said, protesting, "I can't go to a motel with you."
"Good Lord! Why not? What kind of will power do you think I have?"
"We're going to do it, Greg ... I'm going to let you ... Don't you know yet how wild you've driven me? But I'm too well known around this town-BUI is-we can't go to a motel. We just can't!"
"We've got to do something!"
"Yes, we've got to do something, darling."
He tried to laugh. "And soon."
She whispered it, reluctantly, "We could go to my place."
"Your house?" He stared at her. "Now I know you've flipped."
But she merely moved her hand upsettingly upon him, quickening her strokes, tightening her fingers, flexing them.
"Bill's not there," she said as if pleading for it, "he's never home this hour. He won't be there-for hours."
He said nothing, but she moved her hand on him. and she knew she had won. He would agree. This was always the easiest part of it. A motel could be perilous for a man of Greg's position, too.
"Nobody will see us go in," she whispered. "It's best, Greg, you'll see."
He nodded, somehow extraordinarily roused by the thought of his having Bill's wife in Bill's own house probably in Bill's own bed.
He held her close to him, pressed down upon his throbbing needing body until they drove into her yard.
"Park out front," she said. "Even if Bill happened home, he won't think anything of it-as long as we're not hiding."
Greg was finding it difficult to carry on coherent conversation. She had lifted him past the rims of reason into that place where lusts control everything.
He said, "He better not come home any time soon-"
"He won't," she promised, walking pressed close to him into the house.
"I'm past the stage of hiding what I want from you," he told her.
Paula laughed, touching him. "You certainly are!"
Inside the front door, Greg waited only until she closed it behind them. He took her into his arms and drew her body up close to his. He jockeyed her hips around until she was pressed upon him. His mouth covered hers and his tongue parted her lips roughly.
He thrust his tongue between her teeth, sinking it deep into her throat. She let her head go back and her mouth parted wider, accepting him.
His heart thundered upon hers. He withdrew his head a moment, his mouth damp from their lustful kiss. "You know what I want? I want that, but I want more, too. Do you understand?"
She did not try to speak, she only nodded, completely surrendering herself to him.
"Where?" he said, speaking as if groggy with passion.
She nodded vaguely toward a bedroom. He swung her up in his arms. She slipped her hands around his head and they kissed as he carried her into a bedroom.
She stirred in his arms and he set her down, listening to him whisper the sexual needs he wanted to fulfill with her. She felt her face burn.
Her whole body felt as if it were consumed with a raging fever. And she saw that he got a overpowering charge from her reaction to his spoken demands on her.
She closed the blinds quickly. From across the dimly lighted room she said, "Now."
He snapped on the light.
She protested, "Do we need the light?"
He laughed with desperate savagery. "I could have it in the dark with Helen. With anybody. But thanks to fate's incredible kindliness, I'm not with anybody. I'm with you. You. And by heaven, I'm going to have it all. I'm going to see it all."
She stood with her hands at her sides, waiting. She did not protest again.
He stopped a few feet from her. She saw how intoxicated he was. But in that same clarity she saw it had nothing to do with the two martinis he had consumed in the lounge. Greg was drunk with his savage need for her body. There was something upsetting, almost frightening about it because she had never met a man who needed her so desperately.
For one instant she thought longingly that this was what BUI could have had from her, if only he had wanted it....
She shook the thought away, and the bitterness with it. Bill got from her what he wanted. He used her body like this. And this was all he truly wanted-
Paula felt the burn of tears.
And she shook them away, too.
"Take them off, Doll," Greg said huskily. "All of them. Strip down. Naked. I want you the way God made you. Stripped naked."
She nodded and moved numbly to comply. It was as if her mind and her body were quite separated suddenly. It was as though Paula Mapes stood off a few feet watching this lovely, mindless body perform for a man, another man.
Her fingers caught at the zipper on the shantung skirt. It rustled slightly, falling along the tapered planes of her thighs, thudding to the floor at her feet. The nylon blouse was next, and then she stood revealed to him in white panties and the sheerest lace bra.
Greg had not moved. She saw that the only way he could prolong it was to stand watching, without touching her. He was ready to erupt with lustful needs.
She smiled faintly and reached between her shoulder blades and released her bra. It fell along her arms, and then she let it flutter to the floor.
Greg did not pull his eyes from the creamy vision of her high-standing breasts. They were truly fantastic, and their true loveliness had been cruelly restricted even in the sheer lace of the bra. They spilled free, golden, tipped with pink nipples.
He whispered something, but she did not know what it was.
The sound was unintelligible anyhow, a kind of incredulous moaning.
"And now the panties, Doll," he said. He was pleading now and suddenly it was no longer Paula who was enslaved, but Greg. Her loveliness, her nudity enthralled him.
For a moment longer Paula hesitated, enjoying this sudden mastery she had over him, tormenting him with the delight of her naked body.
She brought her splayed hands up and tilted her breasts with them. "Do you like them, Greg?" she said.
Greg could only nod. Sweat stood on his forehead. He licked helplessly at his lips, staring at her nude breasts as if he were a starving man gazing at a banquet.
Paula caught her thumbs under the gleaming white of her panties and rolled them slowly downward over the rise of her belly, the roundness of her hips, the velvety darkness like a neat triangle at her thighs.
The heated invitation of her revealed nakedness ignited him. He fought away his own clothing, letting shirt and trousers fall to the floor, forgotten.
In a kind of ecstasy, she gazed at what he revealed to her and she nodded, waiting for him to claim her body.
She waited, naked. Her nakedness had never meant as much to her as it did in this moment, because no one had ever appreciated her beauty or been as enthralled by it as Greg was.
She saw him approaching and she waited quietly, her hands at her sides.
He pushed his body against hers, and a shiver wracked him as if chill had been invaded by heat.
"Now," she said, breathless.
"Oh yes, it's got to be. Now."
He moved her slowly, and yet rushing her toward the bed she shared with Bill. He was no longer concerned with such possibilities. He was thinking of nothing but the glories she had offered him.
His hands moved on her as she sank to the mattress under the pressure of his demanding form. He was so big! She felt lost, overwhelmed by him, but the goodness and heat of it pervaded her and she spread her legs wide, wider, even before he said it aloud.
"Wider, darling!"
"Oh, yes."
She lifted her legs, thrusting her hips inward and upward to receive him. And then she gasped with agonized delight as he came to her.
"Oh, Greg!"
"You like it!"
"Oh, Greg!"
"You like this?" He moved his big body, stroking faster.
She wailed aloud, seeing how much lust and desire she had kept locked inside her. But Greg had the key. Greg was releasing her from torment. Greg was driving her beyond reason, to the glorious place she had dreamed of, but had all but forsaken as an impossible fantasy.
"Oh, Greg, Greg, Greg," she breathed.
"Move!" he ordered.
"I can't! Oh, I just can't! I can't wait for you if I do!"
"Damn you, I don't want you to wait! I'll make you do it again!"
"Oh, yes." Abruptly, she went wild, unable to contain the needs that erupted, making her work in a frenzy, faster and faster, all lusts were totally unlocked now.
She sagged into the bed under him, heated, flushed and trembling with fatigue. He did not even notice. He was unable to think anything except that he was holding a rigid-nippled breast in his mouth. His hips flailed at her, and she felt herself aroused again; he had not lied. He could manipulate her from weariness to ecstasy with amazing ease.
"Oh, Greg, do it!" she urged, thrusting her hips upward, feeling her spine arched like a fiberglass pole, ready to snap.
He sucked harder at her breasts. It was as if all sensation in her body were concentrated upon that swollen mammary, its sweetly hurting nipple.
Her eyes widened and she stared upward in the lighted room, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, able only to respond to what he was doing to her.
Her breasts quivered, and her hips pounded, matching his movement. Her whole fragrant, sweated body was working in a frenzied need to please him.
"Now!" he yelled.
"Oh, yes! Take me. Take me. Take me!" she cried out.
Greg's hands caught at her hips, cupping them, his fingers painful, digging into her flesh. He moved her to suit him, and kept using her like that moments after she had been lifted to the heights and sent plunging down into the maximum depths of rapture and complete satisfaction.
Then Greg sagged his huge body upon her and they lay still. Gradually her sense of sight and hearing returned. Their hearts quieted, and that's when they heard Bill's car rolling into the driveway.
CHAPTER TWO
Bill was pouring himself a SCOTCH and WATER when Greg followed Paula into the front room a few moments later. Greg straightened his hastily donned clothing. Paula wore a negligee and her lovely face was still flushed and damp from her lovemaking.
Bill turned, smiling at them. He noticed nothing wrong. His handsome face had a look of complete innocence. He was as tall as Prentiss, but slender. His face was sharply hewn of profile, with high cheekbones, a small mouth.
"Greg Prentiss!"
His eyes widened with a smile of delight and Bill nodded, his lace expressing his pleasure.
Paula's face was chilled suddenly. She crossed the room and kissed Bill lightly on the cheek. When he put his hands tightly on her arms, she casually twisted free. She said, "Greg dropped by to see you. I insisted he wait."
"Why, that's fine!" Bill's voice exuded pleasure and enthusiasm.
"I offered him a drink," Paula said, "but he preferred coffee. We were in the kitchen when we heard you drive in."
Bill walked toward Greg, hand extended, his thin lips pulled in a bright, toothy smile. "This is good of you, Greg. A busy man like you, dropping by here to see me like this."
"It's all right," Greg said lamely. "I was in the neighborhood anyhow."
Bill slapped Greg on the arm. "I hope my little woman was hospitable."
"She couldn't have treated me better," Greg said honestly. His face flushed faintly. He tried, but he could not quite look at Paula, or directly at Bill, either, for that matter. He stared at the drink in Bill's hand and shrugged his jacket up on his sweaty shoulders.
"That's fine," Bill said. He swung his arm toward a club chair. "Sit down. I'm sorry I'm late like this. I do most of my work in the early evenings."
"Yes," Greg said. He shifted uncomfortably. He glanced at his wrist watch. It was almost ten. "Well, it's so late, I can't stay."
Bill appeared not even to have heard this. He said again, "Sit down, Mr. Prentiss. Sit down. You get comfortable so we can talk."
Greg's face burned suddenly. He said hollowly, "Talk?" The Lord knew he had nothing to say to Paula's husband. He was too tired to talk, and he hadn't anything left worth saying. He and Paula had said it all in there on Bill's bed. "Talk?" he repeated.
"Sure. You dropped by. About that fifty-thousand dollar-term policy, right?"
Greg winced. "What? Oh, sure. The policy." He added lamely, "I was in the neighborhood anyhow."
He retreated to the club chair. He looked as if he were glad to sit down, even at the cost of listening to Bill Mapes talk insurance. His legs were weak and trembly.
Bill pulled a chair near Greg's. As if magically, Bill's attache case appeared in his lap and some insurance application papers were spread out on top of it.
Vaguely Greg heard Bill's enthusiastic voice. It rubbed his wearied nerves raw. He was too exhausted to listen to this simpleton bleat with such vigor about the qualities of this stupid insurance policy.
Paula slumped down on the divan. She crossed her shapely legs. The negligee parted inches above her creamy knees, revealing expanses of her upper leg to Greg. He drew a deep breath. Incredible that Bill could live in the same house with a lovely sex machine like this and chatter on about insurance policies.
Paula put her head back as if completely bored with the whole business. Greg gazed at her enviously, wishing that he could sleep. His eyes burned, his whole body protested with the weariness that drugged him.
Bill was laughing. "I'll tell you, Mr. Prentiss, it's an odd thing that you dropped by here tonight. Must be ESP or something-"
"ESP?"
"Extra Sensory Perception. You know. Knowing what another person is thinking. Getting thought waves like radar. Don't put much stock in that junk myself, but I know this, something told me to get your application all filled out. Yes, sir. I had a few hours free time this afternoon and I filled out your application for you."
"Application?"
"The fifty thousand dollar policy you said you wanted-"
"I said I wanted?"
"We talked about it. You seemed hesitant. But I'm pleased you changed your mind. It's the best favor you've done yourself and your little family. Nothing to worry about for them-no matter what happens to you, eh?"
"I guess so."
Greg gazed helplessly at Paula across Bill's shoulder, but her head was back and her eyes were closed. He stared at her bared legs.
"You just sign right there, Mr. Prentiss," Bill said. "If a busy man like you can take time off from his schedule to drop by here to take out insurance that is going to protect his family no matter what happens to him, why I can have that policy all filled out and waiting for his signature."
Greg winced. He took the pen Bill proffered. He signed the papers, thinking he would do anything to escape this place. He wanted to get out of here, and he wanted to sleep.
"Well, that's just fine. Now a matter of the first premium," Bill said, folding the application.
"Premium?"
"First month at least. You understand? That makes it binding--on the company. You are protected from right now, Mr. Prentiss, no matter what happens to you. Of course we'll set up a physical exam for you, but you're protected from right now. Nothing will go wrong on the medical check, I'm sure, but if it does why that premium will be returned to you in full."
Greg sweated, feeling he was being pressured beyond reason. But he was too fatigued to think clearly, too tired to protest. He brought out his check book, filled out a check.
"Well, that's just fine, Mr. Prentiss," Bill said. "Now, how about a little drink to celebrate this wise move you just made on behalf of your wife and little ones?"
"I'd love it," Greg breathed.
Bill walked over to the small portable bar and mixed fresh drinks. Greg stood up, staring at Paula now that Bill's back was turned. He tried to signal to her that he would see her again, very soon, but Paula's eyes were closed and her head was back. Her mouth was parted slightly.
She was fast asleep.
Tt was as if she were exhausted after a hard day's work.
Paula woke up abruptly, aware that she was naked.
She started upward, for the moment not even sure where she was. She thought she was still in her bed with Greg. She felt a fleeting panic. They must have fallen asleep.
Then she saw it was Bill, kneeling beside her on the divan. His gaze was traveling warmly over the exposed loveliness of her bared breasts, thighs, long, shapely legs.
His hand covered her breasts, caressing them, teasing at the nipples. She was tired, and like a lionness, pulled away from him, snarling.
"Let me alone."
Bill laughed. "Did the big man beat you down?"
Paula hesitated. She decided not to lie to him. He forced her to do these things. He should suffer along with her. She said, "Yes. He beat me down. He's quite a man. He tired me out."
But this did not hurt Bill. He liked her this way. It exalted him that he so completely owned Paula's body and soul that he could order her to do anything that pleased him, or aided him, and she would do it. It excited him, too. He could lie beside her night after night in their bed and never touch her-though she twisted and suffered with need-but when another man had had her, Bill was beside himself with lust for her.
His hand slipped down from the rise of her breasts, across the expanse of her golden stomach to the sable dark at her thighs.
"Don't do that," she said.
"You know I'm going to."
"I don't want you to." Paula tried to twist free.
He held her tightly. "What's the matter with you?"
"I told you. I'm tired."
"You'll get over that."
"No." Paula shook her head. "Not tonight."
His voice tautened, lashing at her. "What's the matter with you?"
She met his gaze levelly. "You got what you wanted from me."
"Part of it." He grinned, stroking at her thighs. "Not all of it, doll. Not yet. We got the sucker. We got the big policy. Now I want to celebrate."
"No." She pushed him away and stood up. Her nude body gleamed in the lights of the front room. He gazed at her with desire flushing his face, as if he had never had her. "I did what you told me to do. But I don't feel right about it. I feel all-wrong-inside. I don't want you to touch me."
He laughed, standing up. "Well, that's too bad, baby. I'm over-primed."
"I'm sorry, Bill ... I just can't do it. Not any more. You make a tramp out of me. Then I can't come to you."
The smile died in his sharp-featured face. "It has never stopped you before."
"I can't help it."
His voice hoarsened. "You don't like the way we live?"
"No. I don't."
"I don't mean your using your body to help me sell policies that I couldn't swing otherwise. I mean this house, the cars we own, the money we're stashing in the bank-"
"It costs too much!"
"No. It doesn't mean anything. We could live like the ordinary joe struggling on his insurance debit. But we don't have to. I'm a good salesman. I sell more insurance legit than the other droops in my office do. But with your help I can be rich. And what's mine, baby, is yours-the cars, the money, the furs, everything."
"Maybe I don't want them!"
"Maybe you don't! I pay charge accounts every month for lingerie and dresses we couldn't even afford to look at in store windows if you didn't help me. Some of these guys are tough to sell, but they'll all buy one thing, a chance at you."
"I hate it."
"I don't believe that. You're a lovely doll. And you love to have men look at you and tell you how lovely you are, and go bugs, like Prentiss did tonight. You like that."
"Not like this. It's the same as selling myself. It's worse because I have to pretend something else! I have to pretend lies. At least with some women, a man pays, and there is no lying. This is all lying. Even our lives together have become lies, Bill. Can't you see that?"
"I can't see anything except that you can help me make us rich. Your body is one commodity that you can trade on and the demand is great for. All I have to do is bring a tough-hanging client in this house. He takes one look at you, he begins to soften up. He gets a chance at you-like Prentiss-and he signs on the clotted line. I do my part, baby. I work hard. I sell plenty of insurance-"
"Then let's live on that-the part you sell."
"That's not good enough, doll. Not for either one of us."
Paula shook her head helplessly. "You don't believe I hate it, do you?"
He smiled. "I believe you're just tired."
She stared at him. "You don't believe that I hate it so much that I've even begun to hate you?"
He grinned. "No. I don't believe that."
She cried out. "But it's true, Bill. Can't you understand me? I won't hold it against you-all the times I've done it before, not even tonight with Greg Prentiss. I'll forget that you've made a liar and a cheat and a prostitute out of me. But we can't do it any more!"
"Why not?" His voice was easy. He was sure of himself, sure of his control of her.
"Because it's ruining us! It's killing everything between us."
"Not for me." He caught her bare arms and pulled her roughly to him. He slipped his hands to the small of her back and held her tightly to him. He covered her mouth with his, kissing her hungrily. "It makes me want you more than ever."
She pulled free, her face chilled, her eyes glinting. "Do you know what-that man-Greg Prentiss made me do to him? So that when you kiss me-"
He laughed. "You're just upset!"
"I'm more than upset. I'm all torn up inside. I loved you more than I ever believed I could love any man, but I've stopped loving you-"
"Don't say that."
"It's true. I hate you. I've tried to deny it, and hide it, and pretend. But I'm sick of pretense! I'm sick of pretending to feel desire for men that I can't stand. You make me do it with them. Do you know something? What those men do to me-they are doing to you by proxy!"
He laughed. "I don't have that kind of imagination."
"It's true. Maybe that's what you want-maybe you can't admit that's what you want-you want those men!"
His jaw tightened. "I want their money. I want what their money will buy for us. It begins and ends there."
"Oh, sure. That's what you can tell yourself. You can tell yourself these comfortable lies. You're doing it so we can be rich-"
"We're on our way-"
"But would you stop, even then? You don't want me-not unless some other man has had me-and paid you money for me. He thinks it's an insurance premium, but it's for me. I believe that's what you really want, you want those men doing it to you-by proxy."
"Good Lord. You are sick-"
"I told you that! I'm sick living like this."
He reached for her again. "Come on. We'll go to bed. I'll make you forget all about this crazy idea."
"No! I won't go to bed with you. Not tonight. I can't. If you want those men-you go get them. Stop using me."
He shook her. "Paula, you're talking crazy. Why would I need to want those men to have you-"
"Because that's what you want. They do it to you by proxy. Using my body. But they're doing it to you! Because you approve."
"Now that sounds like the typical headshrinker who has never come nearer to life than his textbooks. Baby, we are going to be rich. We might have to do a few things we don't relish right now-"
"A few things! You approve men having me-any way they want me!"
"Look. Now, I'm tired talking about this. I approve. Is that what eats at you?"
"Yes!"
"Would it make it different if I didn't know what you were doing with them?"
She drew a deep breath. "I wouldn't do it if you didn't know."
"That's a lie," Bill said casually.
She swung out and struck him, hardly knowing that she was going to do it.
He shoved her suddenly so she toppled on the divan. He followed her, leaning over her where she sprawled gazing up at him, her eyes glittering.
His cheek glowed lividly where she'd struck him. He seemed unaware of her physical blow.
He spoke hoarsely, gazing down at her. She did not move because suddenly at the look in his face she did not dare to.
"Let's get that nailed down right now."
"Yes," she said. "Let's do."
"Right. Two years ago I suggested you go to bed with a man named Thompson. Right? He was the first one. Right?"
She nodded, frowning.
"We got a ninety-thousand-dollar policy out of Thompson," Bill said. "But that's neither here nor there. It has nothing to do with our little hassle. We want to nail down why I had you do that first one-and all the others since-aside from the fact that it makes us a lot of money-"
"And kills me inside."
"Right. It just happens that I don't believe it kills you inside, or any other way-"
"That's just because you don't know me."
His eyes chilled over. "Maybe I know you better than you think, sugar. Maybe I know a lot more about you than you even suspect. Why do you think I let you start taking on these men?"
Her voice shook. "Because you were tired of me. You didn't want me any more, so you traded me-for your rotten insurance sales."
"Not quite. I never got tired of you. I don't think the male exists who could truly get tired of a body as lovely as this, a body that knows every secret of exciting a man and driving him wild-"
"Then why can't we have it-just for ourselves? That's what I "want!"
"No. That's where you lie."
She shook her head, watching him, puzzled. She felt empty. She waited.
He said, "Let's go back to Thompson. I had been ill for about a month before I asked you to help me soften him up. Do you remember that?"
She nodded, troubled.
"You never asked why I'd been off my feed for a month-"
"That's why I went after that man Thompson for you. I wanted to help you-because you had been ill-just that once. I didn't know you were going to make me do it from then on."
"I was sick," Bill announced coldly, "because of a man named Ed Jewel."
She gasped.
He laughed coldly. "That's right. Your lover. I found out."
"Oh, no!"
"That's right," Bill said levelly. "Ed Jewel. I know he had been a boy friend before we were married. But at the time I couldn't believe that gave him beautyrest rights after we were married-"
"Oh, Bill, no-"
"Oh, Paula, yes. No sense trying to lie out of it. I found out you went to a motel with him. You had him here in this house mornings. I even came back one morning-and watched you with him."
She whimpered.
"That's right. I saw he was better equipped than I. He drove you frantic. There wasn't anything he wanted that he didn't have with you-"
"Bill-"
"Let me finish. At first I was gut sick. For a month I was hardly able to work. Then I began to get well. I even got the idea of putting you to work. I knew what you could do-I knew better after watching Ed Jewel put you through your paces than I had ever known from going to bed with you myself. Then Thompson proved too tough a nut for me to crack-and I told you to bring him to heel, and you did. That's how it started. But don't go holy on me. You'd be doing it anyhow. I think it's better like this. Before Thompson I struggled along borrowing enough to get by on. We got money in the bank, two cars, this house."
Her teeth chattered. "Bill, listen to me. I didn't know why you started me doing this. I didn't know it was going to last."
"You didn't know I knew about Ed Jewel."
"No. I didn't. But that's what you've got to understand. Ed didn't mean anything to me-"
"For a guy that didn't mean anything to you, he did all right with you-in my bed."
Her eyes brimmed with tears. "There was a reason-"
"Sure there was. He was built like a stud. He treated you like-a tramp. I treated you like a wife. I understood that day I watched you two together."
"That's not true!"
"It looked true. It made sense when nothing else did."
"And so all this time you thought I cared less for you-that I didn't really want you-"
"It made me feel like less than a man. I admit that. But it also made me comparatively wealthy. So it evened out."
She clutched at his arms. "Oh, Bill, listen to me. Ed was nobody. He was just handy. That's all. He wanted me. He always wanted me. Then when I found out you were doing it with Edna Duval, I went kind of crazy. I wanted to hurt you. That's why I let Ed do it. That's the only reason."
Bill shook his head. "You can call it revenge on me if you want to. Give it any name that eases your conscience. But never forget two things. First, I saw you in bed with Jewel. I saw what you did for him, the way he drove you crazy as I never had."
She sagged under him.
His voice hounded at her. "And second, Edna Duval was the first hundred-thousand-dollar insurance I ever sold. I admit I went to bed with her. But I didn't want to. I didn't want her. I didn't care for it particularly. It was what she wanted. In fact, she let me know that unless she had what she wanted, I wasn't going to get that sale. She is the only one I had after I married you-up until Ed Jewel came along. Since then, I figured it was none of your business what I did. You were having what you wanted-"
"I hated it with those men. I hated selling myself to your insurance clients. I've hated it from the first. But I could do it. But I can't. Not any more. I won't!"
Bill gazed down at her. "You'll do what I tell you."
"No, Bill. I'm sorry-about Ed. I was trying to hit back at you-"
"You loved it!"
"All right! He drove me crazy. He was so wild for me-and I was hurt. You were having Edna, you didn't want me. So I went wild with him. But I hate what we're doing now."
He gazed at her a moment. He said, "We won't talk about it any more tonight."
"Then let me up."
"Why?"
"I'm going to bed, Bill-in the guest room-alone. Maybe we can start over tomorrow, but-"
"I'm going to have you, Paula. Now!"
"No." She struggled. She put her hands against his shoulders and shoved him. She came upward as if on a steel spring.
Bill fell away. Paula lunged free. She ran across the room toward the guest bed room.
Bill sprang after her. He shoved out his hand and snagged her ankle. She lost her balance and toppled to the rug.
On her hands and knees, she tried to crawl away from him.
Still holding her ankle vise-like in his fist, Bill pulled himself after her. He came up on his knees behind her, caught her around the waist with his free arm.
"Let me go!"
"No. I told you. You're mine. We can have it on the bed or like this. But I'm going to have it. Now."
"I'll hate you."
"Right now that doesn't worry me half as much as going to bed hurting for it."
She tried to crawl away from him, but he held her upon him. On his knees, he pulled her bottom hard against him and explored her nakedness with his hands. He was rough, holding her immobile and fondling her breasts and thighs at the same time.
She struggled. She cried out, never having realized before that Bill was so strong, so brutal when roused, or denied.
She felt her face flushed, burning, but not with passion. She felt shame, more shame that Bill was debasing her like this than for what she had done in his bed with Ed Jewel, or Greg, or any of the others.
Those others did not really matter. She would not see them again. They could not make her do anything unless she wanted to do it.
It was different with Bill. He could make her do anything. Not even Bill knew what terrible power he wielded over her. He freed all the flesh-hungers that swarmed inside her.
Bill alone could drag her down. He could make a wanton of her, a tramp; he could force her into degradation that would ruin her.
She cried out, trying to get free. Perhaps she had been unfaithful to Bill with Ed, that one time, in a fury of jealousy. But Bill had started her doing this with all those other men, forcing her to strip brazenly, to pretend passion, to rouse their lusts.
He was corrupting her, spoiling all that could have been lovely between them, dragging her down.
He alone. Her own husband.
He could tell her and himself he was doing it for them, but what good were riches, if everything else was dead between them?
Why couldn't she fight free? But she couldn't, and his hands and what he was doing to her back there was driving her into a frenzy of excitement.
His hands gripped her pelvis on both sides and he manipulated her body for his use and gratification, and she quivered there on her hands and knees for him.
She wanted to break free, but she could not. She was at war inside herself now-a battle she knew she was losing.
Oh, that felt good!
Don't! Don't! Don't!
The wild delights drove everything from her mind. She wanted to cry out that any man could use her as Bill did, that he knew all her secrets, that she had no defenses against him.
Just now she wanted none.
She wanted only what he was doing to her.
She admitted that he was using her like an animal, debasing her because it pleased him to prove that he could.
She no longer cared!
She suddenly no longer cared about anything except that Bill not stop what he was doing to her, faster and faster. The delight shivered through her and she began to pulsate her hips for him, arching her back.
Oh, Bill, love me! Don't ever stop loving me!
She felt weak in her arms and legs, but she remained there, her hair flowing down around her face, her breasts suspended, taut, nipples rigid. The floor and the ceiling spun around her, changing places, and she knew that Bill was thrusting her down, deeper and deeper toward that dark place from which she could never return.
She couldn't have cared less!
CHAPTER THREE
Paula watched Bill finish off his cup of coffee across the breakfast table.
"Will you be late?" she asked. She hardly expected an answer, she was merely searching for something to say. In the two weeks since Greg had had her she and Bill had less and less to say to each other.
Bill gave her a brief glance. "Keep your cool, doll. I don't want you to do anything-not for me."
Her chin tilted. "I told you I don't do it for anyone except you."
"Gives you a lot of time for knitting, doesn't it?" He smiled coldly at her and left the room. She remained unmoving, hearing his car going away along the drive.
She looked down at her shapely body clearly outlined in the delicate gown and negligee. Two weeks. Bill had used her body that night when Greg had her; Bill hadn't come near her since.
Paula winced slightly. This had happened before-Bill's ignoring her in the bedroom-but it was worse now because she knew why. He didn't want her because of what he had caught her doing two years ago with Ed Jewel. Bill had her now when lusts aroused him beyond control. Otherwise he remained chilled toward her, as if he realized she didn't truly want him, and he would not force himself upon her.
Only this wasn't true!
She stared at her whitened knuckles. If only she had stayed away from Ed Jewel. She admitted now that she'd known that Bill's interest in Edna Duval was strictly business, that the Duval woman was nothing that Bill wanted.
Her face burned. Had she used the business-oriented flirtation between Edna and Bill as conscience-salve for her affair with Ed? Looking back now she saw that Ed had been calling her on the phone, meeting her in the shopping centers, turning up unexpectedly. Ed had been unwilling to accept her marriage as the final break between them. He wouldn't take no.
She pressed the back of her hand across her mouth. She recalled the way she had started with Ed-the drink in the bar, driving in his car. He'd parked, held her in his arms, and then forced her to hold him. Shudders wracked her then at the size and rigidity of him, and she trembled slightly even now, remembering.
She'd been unable to resist Ed then in his car, or any of the other times he had come around and found her alone. She had tried to fight him, but the battle was inside her-it was as if she were two Paula Mapes-one a faithful wife to Bill, the other a wanton unable to stay away from the fires Ed ignited in her fevered body.
Remembering him now, she felt shaken. There was a burning in the region of her thighs. She moved her fingers tentatively toward it, hoping to soothe it. But it was not soothed, it was worse.
Her breathing quickened.
It was all Bill's fault. He neglected her. He forced her to do abnormal things with strange men. She hated him.
Cal Oliver nodded when Bill suggested a poker party in the closed area of a private club.
"Sure, I like poker," Cal said. "It's one of my few recreations."
Bill grinned. "You'll like this poker party, Cal. It's got everything."
Cal didn't look like a millionaire, self-made, under forty, but the fact was he was wealthy though he came from a poverty pocket and had worked his way through electronics engineering school at the state university. He'd been in the top five of his class, had been hired by a mammoth electronics complex. He'd stayed with the company five years in which time he advanced from junior engineer to senior project engineer. On his spare time he had developed a small transistorized device that replaced bulky wiring, tubes and condensers in computer transmission. He built them with part-time labor until government contracts forced him into full production with over a thousand employees and an expanding plant of his own.
"You're still trying to sell me a half-million dollar insurance policy," Cal told him, "even when I tell you my company is covered by every known insurance and my wife died in an auto accident two years ago. I don't need a half-million more insurance."
Bill grinned and shrugged. "Maybe you don't, Cal. But I need the commissions from a sale like that. And anyhow, a poker game with females, what can you lose?"
"Girls?" Cal frowned.
"Sure. I figured you went in for progress. This is the latest. Girls serve us drinks, snacks, get new decks of cards, run around in string bikinis."
"I'm afraid this sort of thing doesn't interest me, old fellow," Cal protested.
Bill laughed. "You haven't tried it, don't knock it."
There were five men in the poker game and three serving-girls. They were in the nude to the thighs, and here they were not so much covered as accented by the form-fitting gold bikini pants. Their high heels made their legs longer and shapelier even than nature had.
The girls were introduced as Kay, Francie and Lorry in no particular order. The party host, fat and balding with a hoarse voice and sweated face, said, "Anything you boys want-just tell the girls. Anything."
Bill found his gaze captured by the saucy breasts of the blonde. Her breasts were not as large as Paula's, but they thrust upward, nipples pointing, almost as if taunting. Bill forgot Cal Oliver and the half-million dollar insurance. He couldn't take his eyes off the blonde's boobies.
Cal was the only man present who wanted to play poker. He was quickly overruled and drowned out with hoots of laughter. Somebody shouted, "Give Cal some cards and let him play with himself!"
The room rattled with laughter. The girls looked at each other and smiled, too. They filled large martini glasses with gin, dribbled a little vermouth into each glass, served it.
"Put on a show!" the hoarse-voiced host ordered.
The girls frowned uncertainly. "A show?" the blonde said. "What kind of show?"
"Play by ear!" the host shouted. "Just get up there in front of us-you'll think of something!"
The blonde protested, "But they told us we'd just have to serve you-and maybe-"
"And maybe bed us down one at a time?" the host roared, laughing. "If they told you this was anything less than an orgy, they kidded you."
The redhead whispered something in the blonde's ear. The brunette led the way into the cleared area beyond the poker table.
Bill pulled his gaze from the torment of the blonde's breasts long enough to see that Cal was sitting uncomfortably at the table, trying not to look at anybody.
"Come on, Cal!" Bill shouted at him. "Have a good time."
Cal gave him an uncertain grin, took a deep drink of the nearest martini.
The blonde turned up the music. She began to do a very slow-timed go-go dance near where the other two girls stood close together. The men whistled when the redhead began kissing the brunette's breasts. The brunette put her head back, closed her eyes and stood like a creamy statue with her arms down at her sides.
The men leaned forward, gasping for breath, as the love-making between redhead and brunette continued. This may have been a spontaneous show, but it was like something rehearsed in its effect on the widened audience. The brunette's bikini pants were rolled slowly down her hips, along her legs. The redhead lowered herself slowly to her knees before her and the frenzy increased between them, the saucy-breasted blonde increased the tempo of her dance.
Bill stared at the blonde, watching the two women from the corners of his eyes. The blonde watched the other girls as if fascinated, her gyrations increasing in direct ratio to the lustful perversions between them.
The brunette went back, slowly, slowly, her hair dripping like weeping-willows, her back arched, her knees bent. She lowered herself like that until her head touched the floor and the redhead supported her with her arms about her knees. The redhead seemed to have forgotten everything in the world except the brunette's naked body and what she herself was doing to it.
In a serpentine glide the brunette slithered to the floor on her back, taking the redhead with her. By now the room seemed reverberating with the music and the blonde was flinging herself in frenzied rhythmic gyrations her gaze fixed on the two women on the floor.
The host, who had consumed half a bottle of raw gin during the performance, leaped to his feet suddenly. He ran across to where the girls were entangled. He caught the brunette in his arms, lifting her away from her partner. He carried her past his cheering fellows, going with her into the small adjoining room which was furnished with couches.
The redhead remained curled on the floor until one of the other men claimed her. He lifted her up and carried her into another cubicle.
This left the blonde.
Bill hesitated only a moment. It crossed his mind that Cal was his guest and he wanted Cal pleasured, but in that same instant he realized there was another man besides himself and Cal. Somebody was going to have to wait.
He reacted instinctively. He wasn't going to stand in line, not for that blonde. She had set him afire from the first instant.
She danced, her arms swinging. Bill got up and ran to her. He took her in his arms. She stopped swinging those arms, but her body persisted in time with the music.
Bill said, "Now, baby. It's us."
She nodded. "Yes. You were the one I wanted."
He swung her up in his arms, half running with her as if afraid something might yet stop or delay him. As he went into the side room with her he saw that the two remaining men sat silently at the table.
Bill quickly put them from his mind with the blonde in his arms. She was as playful as a puppy. The sauciness of her upthrust breasts was a key to her personality. She stood before Bill, undulating slightly, while he rolled the bikini panties away along the ceramic-glaze smoothness of her golden legs. He caught her about the naked hips then, pressing his face into the fragrance of her flesh.
His kissing her left her breathlessly anxious, and she sank to the couch under him. Bill could never remember having been so excited. The charged atmosphere of these locked rooms, the drinks they'd been served, the fact that two of the other men were enjoying like delights in the other cubicles added to his already wild mood.
He found himself remembering the way Ed Jewel had treated Paula in his bed two years ago. He had stood numbed watching as Jewel used Paula as if she were a concubine, a slave, a bought female made for pleasure. This was what he wanted with the blonde. And this is what he had. He whimpered half-hearted protests only added zest to his boiling lusts.
She went as wild as he was, and suddenly there was nothing in the world except their flaring bodies, their labored breathing, the distant subdued laughter of the other men and girls at play.
Finally, she fell away from him exhausted. "Enough, tiger," she whispered.
Bill smiled and nodded because he was trembling with exhaustion. He laid his hand on the tauting uptilt of her breasts and for some moments they were silent. letting their breathing return to normal.
Suddenly he remembered Cal. "Stay where you are," he said.
"Gladly, but where are you off to, Batman?"
"I just remembered something. The guy I brought with me. I was so pleased with you that I forgot it was more important that he be entertained than that I be flattened like this."
She was not surprised. "Big business deal?"
"The biggest."
"And you think he'll enjoy me?"
"Unless he's dead he will."
She smiled. "Okay. I'll do it, hon. For you. He'll be too weak to say no to you."
He kissed her roughly. "You promise?"
She laughed. "I do unless you keep kissing nr like that. I won't be able to let you go."
He dressed and went out into the other room. Cal was seated alone at the poker table. Two of the men were sharing the squealing brunette in a crib, the door standing open.
"Quite a girl in there," Bill said to Cal. "She's waiting for you."
Cal's smile was chilled. "I thought this was a poker party, Bill ... I wouldn't have come."
Bill stared at him. "You got to be kidding."
Cal merely shrugged. "Come on, Cal. She's waiting for you. I don't care what you've had, or how long you live, this will be a night you'll tell your grandsons about."
Cal gazed at him a moment and then stood up, almost reluctantly.
Bill said, "You'll thank me for this."
But Cal winced suddenly and leaned heavily against the table.
Bill caught his arm, deeply troubled. "Cal! What's the matter?"
Cal stayed slumped there for some moments, his face deathly gray, his fists gripping the side of the table. At last he straightened, shook Bill's hand from his arm.
"Just a touch of indigestion. That's all. Rich food, gin, and these wild women. It hasn't agreed with me. I'll be all right...."
Frowning, Bill sat down alone at the table and watched Cal walk toward the blonde in the crib like a man going toward the gallows....
After half an hour, the blonde came out of the cubicle where she had entertained Cal. She was naked, as completely unselfconscious in her nudity as a child.
She sat beside Bill. "You ought to take your friend home, Batman," she said.
Bill tensed. "Why? What's the matter?"
"I don't think he feels well. I did everything I promised you I would, hon, but he didn't respond very much. I made him want me-but it wasn't easy."
"Okay, Blondie, thanks." Bill kissed her and pressed a twenty-dollar bill between her breasts.
Cal was silent, slumped in the seat of the car. His apartment had a sleek, unlived-in look. Bill opened the door for him and Cal stumbled slightly, crossing the threshold.
"You can run along, Mapes," Cal said. "I'll be all right."
"I want to be sure you are okay," Bill said. "I'll just hang around a while. Nowhere to go this time of night."
Cal looked at him oddly. "Except home."
Bill laughed. "Yeah. Except home."
"I saw your wife one day, Mapes. I'm astonished that you'd find tramps like the little blonde exciting."
Bill frowned slightly. "You think my wife looks like a winner, eh?"
Cal slumped in a deep chair. He sat unconsciously rubbing at his solar plexus. "Rich food and liquor," he said. "It knocks me. Should have known better. Afraid you got me there under false pretenses."
"Just wanted you to have a good time," Bill said.
Cal smiled faintly. "Anything to keep me in a buying mood, eh?"
Bill matched his smile. "Something like that."
"You're going at it all wrong, Bill. I've remained a widower since my wife's accidental death because I never expect to find another woman like her. All my life I've never compromised. I won't accept less than the best."
"Still, even a big executive needs a night of relaxing."
"Rolling in the gutter has never been my idea of relaxation, old fellow."
"Okay. Okay. So you're sore that I dragged you into a party you disapprove of. So I was wrong."
"No. I appreciate the thought behind the deed. You were thinking about me. I do appreciate that. If I'm ever in the market for half a million dollars in insurance I'll keep you in mind."
Bill pretended to waive this. "What was your wife like?"
"She was dedicated to the proposition that I came first, Bill. She was lovely, gentle, with class that is unobtrusive, but is as much a part of a woman as her facial features or her body. All men looked at her and wanted her, but I alone had her. This was important to me. I guess my ego needed the boost that this knowledge gave it. I had never had anything that was entirely new and mine-and better than anything anyone else possessed-until I had her. We were very happy. I don't expect to find another woman like that."
Paula took a hot shower, a cold shower. She let the needling spray of water batter at her naked body. The water ran in rivulets along her skin, heated by the fever within her.
She waited until midnight, but Bill obviously was out for the night. He had not bothered telling her where he was going. He seldom did bother to tell her any more.
She came out of the shower and rubbed herself dry. Her body prickled at her touch. She sprayed toilet water on her skin, pinned her hail on the top of her head and lay down naked across the bed.
She saw her reflection in the hazy mirror. She twisted voluptuously on the bed, watching herself in the glass. She moved her hands over her breasts, down across the rise of her stomach, moving her fingers in a circular motion, faster and faster.
Her breathing increased, became frantic. She was being starved for sexual release and the inner exaltation that being loved gives a woman.
Bill was starving her. He didn't want her because Ed had had her, and because she refused to let him exchange her body and her favors for sales of high-priced insurance policies.
She turned her head on the pillow, feeling the increase of passions in her loins. Her gaze struck the telephone.
She felt a sudden urge to call Ed. He would come to her, even at this hour. He would use her as if she were less than trash, but she could not imagine anything more satisfying at this moment. Her hand moved faster.
Call Ed. Call Greg Prentiss. Where was Bill? Why wasn't he here when she needed him?
His staying away like this made her hate him more than ever.
Bill walked into the bedroom at five-thirty that morning. He snapped on a light at Paula's vanity. The light and its reflected glow spread across Paula, nude and shapely in exhausted sleep across the bed.
He undressed, his body tired, but his mind active and clicking like a computer with the plan that had flashed in his brain in Cal Oliver's apartment.
In his pajama bottoms, Bill yawned. He stood for some moments in silence gazing at the relaxed mounds of Paula's breasts, the soft nipples, the arch of her rounded belly, the neat triangle of femininity. He knew what she had done with Ed Jewel, what she had done for the men to whom he had sold those insurance policies that made him comparatively wealthy.
His mouth pulled. He had no such wealth as Cal Oliver. He was nowhere in Oliver's class, but he was by far the wealthiest insurance peddler that he knew. Still, it could be better. He knew now how he could make it better.
He reached over, shook Paula's shoulder, called her name until she came unwillingly awake.
"What's matter?" she protested. "What time is it?"
"Time to wake up and listen to me," he said.
She opened her eyes. She saw that she was nude. Exhausted by what she had done to herself, she had fallen asleep without even putting on her gown.
Idly, Bill played with her nipples until they grew rigid like small pink marbles between his fingers.
"I've got something I want you to do for me, Paula."
She pulled away from his hand, drawing in a deep breath of rage. "I might have known it! The only reason you ever come near me any more."
"It's a half-million dollar policy," he said quietly. "Maybe more."
"Maybe more," she said in contempt, "that would depend on me, and what T do for this new man, wouldn't it?"
"That's right. I've been with him all night I think you could do it. If you played it right, you could make him do anything."
"Well, I won't. I told you I was through."
Bill frowned. He remembered the naked body of the little blonde, the way she had asked him to send Cal in, anxious to do anything he wanted. And no matter what anyone said, there was little difference between the little blonde professional and Paula. Paula chose her lovers-her Ed Jewels-but in bed the two women were closer than sisters!
"You'll do it," he said.
"Maybe you didn't hear me. I'm through doing things like that-for you, or anybody. They're evil. They make me feel vile. They kill everything between us. I won't do it."
"I don't want to argue with you."
"Then don't. Forget it. Go to sleep, and let me sleep."
She turned over on the bed, but Bill caught her shoulder and jerked her back.
His face was white. "Paula, listen to me!"
"I won't do it!" she wailed. "You hear me, Bill? Not any more. You can't make me do it. I'll leave you first. I'll walk out. I won't stay with you."
For some moments neither of them spoke. Bill stared down at the fiery eyes, the taut cheeks, the set mouth, the determined jaw. But after a moment he did not see a lovely woman enraged, he saw Blondy's willing nakedness, he saw Paula flailing herself in wildest abandon for Ed Jewel on this same bed.
"All right," he said at last.
She stared up at him. "All right what?"
"All right. Walk out."
"I will. If that's all you want me for, I will walk out."
"Then do it."
She laughed in rage. "Right now? In the middle of the night?"
"It's as good a time as any. I don't want you around if you won't do this for me. I told you. This is half-a-million. I need you. I can't get it without you. With the other big policies that I've sold-that you've helped me get-I'd be fixed."
"Can't you understand? Money won't help us, if you make me go on doing this."
He was silent a moment, then he said, "Suppose I never asked it again. This one time. This one last time."
She bit her lip, watching him. "I don't trust you." He was silent another long moment. "If it was in writing?"
"This does mean a lot to you, doesn't it?"
He nodded, sweating. "The biggest. I could stop scrounging. If I got this big one, I could go after other big ones, legit."
She rolled away from him. The bed was cooler across the mattress away from him. But she was fevered.
She stared at him. She had sworn to herself that she was through playing Bill's sex-games for him. Greg was the last, the best and the last. Greg had called her a dozen times in the past two weeks, and she had refused to see him. Finally when Greg would no longer accept her refusal, she'd told him that Bill had become suspicious and threatened to divorce her, naming Greg as correspondent. This had stopped Greg.
She exhaled. She had been so sure it was all over, all of it ended. But tonight the fevered need for sexual gratification had obsessed her. She wondered if she were considering Bill's proposition because he vowed it was the last such demand he would ever make on her body, or because her need for a man-any man!-overwhelmed her.
"You swear it? This is the last one, Bill?" Her voice was hollow.
He grinned, more sure of himself, his old self-confidence returning. "I'll never ask it again. I swear it. You get this one for me, Paula, and everything will be different for us."
Paula bit her lip. "I can't go on the way we have-these last two weeks, Bill. I need loving. From you. If I do this-you've got to swear to love me."
He laughed, pleased. "I'll be a rich man, Paula. I'll have time for you. No more staying out until midnight talking to prospects. Our time will be our own. I'm talking about a half-million dollars."
Her face flushed slightly. She was aware that Bill in his excitement was moving his hands on her, his fingers moving at her thighs. She sighed a little because she knew that the long drought was over, for tonight anyhow.
And maybe this moment was all that mattered. She said, worriedly. "Would I be able to do it? A half million? What would I have to do for that much money."
Bill's hand moved on her. "Be yourself."
"What?"
His voice showed his new confidence. "I was through asking you to help me make the tough sales, Paula. I figured you didn't care enough for me to help me, the hell with you-"
"It wasn't that-"
"It was. But you couldn't admit it. I saw how you'd come to despise me. So I figured it was over. But tonight I almost lost this guy-maybe I did lose him-maybe no matter what either one of us do, we can't get him. I don't know. All I know is you are the one woman that could get to him, get under his skin, give him what he wants."
"Me? Why do you think I could do it?"
"I know you could. I sat there, empty-bellied, listening to him. It was as if he were describing you."
"Was he talking about the kind of woman he wanted?"
"No. He was talking about the kind of woman he never expected to meet again-the kind he had had."
"Who was she?"
"His wife. She was killed two years ago in an accident. But while he sat there talking about her, all the time I knew he was really talking about you. Only he didn't know it"
CHAPTER FOUR
Paula bit her lip, disappointed and unhappy, Bill introduced her to Cal Oliver.
She'd known it was all a business proposition m Bill's mind, the sexy things he wanted her to do for Oliver. Not all his prospects could be as handsome and rugged as Greg Prentiss. Few of them had been.
But Cal was the least prepossessing of all.
Bill had brought around older men, but either there had been something outstanding about each of them, or she had found something interesting in them.
Most of Bill's clients were younger, because it was to the young married man that most insurance pitches were slanted.
It was just that her loneliness, and need, had built up a feeling of wildness in her, and Cal Oliver was too slender of build, of only medium height, pale, even mildly sickly looking-how could a man like this arouse her at all?
"Well, Cal, here she is-the beautiful little wife I've been telling you about!" Bill said with that extravagant enthusiasm that was part of his sales attitude.
He had brought Cal home to dinner with him, and now they stood inside the front door in a small void of silence.
Paula winced slightly. It wasn't that Cal was ugly-if he had been, even this might have been intriguing. He was palely handsome enough, retiring looking, and she could not even think how he could have become head of a huge electronics corporation. He was like a gray blur.
It would be so easy to forget he was in the room.
And it was worse because she saw the way Cal looked at her. There was the distinct look of shock in his pale eyes. She wore a simple house dress, had come to the door flushed from kitchen work. But it was as if she were something by Renoir.
Cal couldn't take his eyes off of her.
He did not speak.
"Well, come on!" Bill took Cal's arm. "Now that you've met the little woman, let's have a few drinks before supper."
Paula saw in Bill's face that he was pleased with the stunning impression she had made on Cal. In that moment she felt sorry for the slender man. Bill was so much larger. It was as if Bill led Cal into his cave to devour him.
Paula felt an urgent need to warn him: Run, Cal, get out of here while you can!
But of course she held her breath, said nothing. After all, it was only an insurance policy. Obviously it was too large, shaped more to Bill's desires than to Mr. Oliver's needs. But Cal was a business man. Surely he had not gotten where he was like a lamb at slaughter, unable to protect himself.
She followed Bill and Cal into the living room where Bill mixed and poured martinis for them.
She took her glass and drank the liquid quickly. The room spun briefly but alarmingly.
Bill drank his martini, but Cal stood with his glass in his fingers.
"Drink up, Cal."
"I have to drink sparingly, Bill," Cal said. "My indigestion. Remember?"
Bill laughed. "That's too bad. But there's nothing wrong with me-nothing that a couple more martinis won't cure."
"Bill, take it easy," Paula protested.
Bill glanced at her warningly. She flushed, knowing he was telling her to concentrate on their guest and leave him alone.
She hated this, the pretense and the deception. It was like some battle maneuver worked out in advance-you feinted in on the enemy's flank and then struck him head-on when he wasn't looking. She hated herself worse than ever for having allowed Bill to line her up like this even this final time.
Cal had not taken his eyes off of her. He tried to be polite, tried to show some interest in the casual things Bill was saying, but clearly Mr. Oliver was deeply impressed with Bill's wife.
Paula felt herself growing warmer under the influence of her one martini and the directness and admiration of Cal's gaze.
Bill finished off his second drink.
Paula said, "I'll put dinner on the table."
"Is there anything I can do to help you?" Cal asked.
Bill laughed. "That's woman's work, Cal!"
"I got in the habit of helping my wife-the last year or so she was alive. I liked it. It made it all seem more like sharing."
Paula shook her head. "No. I'm all right." She tried to smile. "I wouldn't know what to do with a man in the kitchen around this house."
The last she heard of them in the front room was Bill's offering Cal another martini and Cal's refusing. Bill said, "Don't mind me. I need just one more to see me through dinner."
Bill drank his way through the meal. Paula served the dinner with a minimum of confusion. She remained cool, unhurried.
Bill talked insurance all through dinner, but his voice grew hoarse and slurred, and finally it was clear that not even Bill himself was listening to what he said any more.
Paula tried to talk with Cal. It wasn't easy. He was rigid, uncomfortable, and he could not help staring at her in a rapt, upsetting way.
She persisted though, and he told her about his early years in school, his marriage, and the stunning loss of his wife in a tragic accident.
"I thought I'd never find another woman remotely like her," Cal said.
"Oh? And have you?" Paula said.
"I have now," Cal told her in that quiet sincere way.
Beyond Cal, Paula caught a glimpse of Bill's wolfish grin, half hidden behind his martini glass.
It was clear to her what Bill's grin said-they were on their way. If she handled Cal right, they couldn't lose.
Paula tilted her head and she wanted to say aloud that it was all off. Cal was simply an ordinary, nice-looking, quiet and unassuming man. They had no right to do anything like this to him.
She didn't want Cal on her conscience.
She wanted to be free of this whole sordid racket. Bill wavered unsteadily in his chair, and Paula glared at him. She hated him more fiercely now than she ever had before. All he cared about was his insurance sales, never mind whom he hurt, or what he did to her. None of that mattered to Bill.
She shook this thought away. This was a vicious circle, and she had been over it fruitlessly too many times before.
Bill said, "How about that?"
"How about what?" Paula said.
"You remind Cal of his wife," Bill said loudly as if the thought had never occurred to him before.
"I'm very flattered," Paula said.
"She wasn't as lovely as you," Cal said. "Not nearly as lovely. She couldn't cook or organize a dinner like this and remain as cool and unruffled as you, but there was that same innate goodness about her that anyone can see in you, Mrs. Mapes."
Bill hooted with laughter. "Mrs. Mapes? Who the devil is Mrs. Mapes? Call her Paula, Cal. We're all friends here."
"All right," Cal said. "It's very reassuring to me to find a woman like you in this world, Paula. And if you are my friend, I'm very pleased."
"I hope we can be good friends," Paula said uncomfortably.
"Just one big happy family," Bill said. His head slumped on his chest.
Paula frowned. "We'd better have coffee in the living room or Bill will fall face first in his plate."
Bill's head jerked up. "Don't start in on me, Paula! I can hold my liquor as well as anybody. Better."
Paula caught her breath. Her cheeks paled out slightly. Tension whipped around the table.
Cal's soft voice broke the charged silence. "Bill is all keyed up, Paula. I believe that his whole life is insurance-"
"I know it is," Paula agreed.
"So what's wrong with that?" Bill wanted to know. His voice slurred. "It buys you everything you want, doesn't it? I'm a good salesman, and I work hard."
Paula tried to laugh. "And you drink hard, too."
Again Cal was the mediator between them. "Maybe Bill has to drink hard, Paula. I'm not taking his side against you-I wouldn't do that for anything-but I've seen the way it is with a salesman. Especially a good salesman. They live keyed-up. Mostly they are nice guys that their customers look forward to seeing each visit because it always means a moment of relaxing, a little laughter, and maybe a few drinks. That's what it means for the customer. Maybe the only drinking and laughing the customer does is when the salesman arrives. But the salesman is drinking and laughing with everybody. It isn't easy, and the cost is terrible to a man."
Paula helped Bill into the front room. He sat on the divan. Cal sank into a club chair under an unlighted lamp, but even in the darkness Paula could feel Cal's eyes on her.
When she returned from the kitchen with coffee on a silver service tray, she found Cal sitting quietly under the dark lamp and Bill sprawled asleep on the couch.
How easy it makes it for Cal and mel Paula thought bitterly.
She placed the coffee tray on a table, poured for herself and Cal.
Cal said, "Bill's beat. I'll just finish my coffee and run."
Paula chewed at the inside of her lip, wanting to agree that this was what Cal should do.
This was what she wanted him to do.
But she knew she could not do it. Bill would be raging with anger when he woke if Cal were gone and she had no progress to report in the sex-attack department.
She heard herself saying, almost as if it were a recording that had been played back many times before in this same situation, "Please stay. Bill often falls asleep for maybe an hour or so after dinner. It's as you say. He gets so tired, and I know he does work hard. But he'll wake up-and he'd be terribly disappointed if I let you get away like this."
She sighed, seeing that he was relieved that she'd invited him to stay. In the shadows, perhaps he thought, she could not see how much he wanted her. She could see, all right.
They finished off their coffee and all the small talk that Paula could initiate. She felt drained, tense. She stared at her hands, locked in her lap so they would not tremble.
Bill snored on the couch.
"Another lovely evening with the Bill Mapes," Paula said, trying to laugh.
"He works hard," Cal said. But the sound was lame. He was not thinking about Bill. It was hard for him to pretend.
Honesty was not only the best policy with Cal, it was the only one possible to him. He stared at her. "If I had you, Paula," and he cleared his throat, "I'm afraid I wouldn't sleep much. Or talk insurance. I might never even go to work at all."
She smiled and thanked him, almost as uncomfortable as he was.
She got up, put several records of mood music on the stereo.
She stood before him, aware of the light touching at her, enhancing the beauty that overwhelmed poor Cal now. It -rimmed the tilt of her breasts, put a halo about her hair, accented the curves of her ankles.
She said, "Would you like to dance, Cal?"
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a dancer."
"Who is any more?" she said. "Real dancing is almost lost in the fertility rites that kids practice now. I meant the old-fashioned kind-"
"With my arms around you?" Cal sounded breathless and pleased.
"If that's the way it's done," she said, watching him.
He stood up slowly and walked across the room to her. But she did not wait for him. She turned and went into the sun room beyond the opened French doors. He followed her.
She waited for him, with her arms lifted. She tried to relax but she was rigid, set against the touch of his hand.
His hands came in contact with her almost hesitantly. He took her left hand in his, and his fingers were chilled. His other hand flattened at the small of her back sedately, and yet she knew electric excitement quivered through him.
She stepped in to him, closer than she needed to. He was excited, aroused by her, already. She felt that.
He shivered mildly, but he did not pull away.
They danced. There was nothing smooth or elegant about them together except in one way: clearly Cal loved holding her like this. Dancing with her was more than he had permitted himself to believe would ever happen between them!
If he only knew, she thought bitterly.
When he made no further advances, content to hold her in slow motion dancing, she pressed her hips in closer, pushing herself upon him. She moved away quickly, as if this were something she had done on an irresistible impulse, and instantly regretted.
How she hated herself even as she pretended passions for him.
Cal breathed, "You're the most exciting woman alive, Mrs. Mapes."
She tried to laugh. "Mrs. Mapes?"
"I had to say it that way. I had to remind yourself."
She said, "Maybe somebody should remind Bill."
He took the bait instantly. "You're not happy with Bill, Paula?"
She tilted her head back, looking at him. "What do you think?"
He tried to laugh it off. "I think he's a handsome man."
"Maybe handsome isn't everything. Maybe I'd like a good man-one who thought only of me."
She pressed herself in upon him again, this time staying there as though she could not resist. She moved her hips expertly. She looked up into his widened eyes.
He had never expected anything like this.
She breathed across her parted lips.
"You're so nice," she said. "So gentle. So fine. So clean and good ... I don't think I've ever met anyone like you before."
Cal tried to pull away, but she held him upon her, doing it without appearing aggressive. She looked at him, with her lips parted. He fought against it all a moment longer and then his lips smashed upon hers, longingly, hungrily.
"Oh, Paula! Oh God, Paula."
Paula didn't answer because she was stunned, caught in a surprise of her own: there was a gin-scented sweetness about his kiss, a demanding kind of strength in it that she had not known with Bill, or Ed or Greg. It was like something new and for a moment she surrendered herself to it, drawing all the sweetness and warmth and charged excitement from it.
After a moment her eyes closed heavily. She sagged in upon him, her breasts flattening on his chest. She felt his insistent tongue battering at her teeth. She did not resist. She opened her mouth to him and he thrust his tongue in deeply.
He held her like this for a long time. She felt their bodies growing hotter and hotter, seeming to merge together.
He staggered away from her, shaking his head.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I had no right."
She gazed at him, puzzled.
"What are you talking about?"
"You're married, Paula. To a fine man. You could never want anyone like me. You were trying to be nice to a customer of your husband's, and I took advantage of it. I apologize."
"It's not like that at all."
He gazed at her, wincing. In that moment she saw that Cal was smarter than she'd believed at first, better, and more sensitive. He knew it was not like that, no matter what it started out to be. They had both been deeply affected by that kiss.
"I'd better go," Cal said. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate-everything. How much this evening has meant to me. I'll never forget it, Paula-and I'll never forget you."
She stood chilled, watching him.
She said, "Wait. I'll wake up Bill. I know he'll want to talk to you."
He gave her a wry smile. "Don't worry about, Bill, dear. I understand. With Bill it's that insurance policy. So don't waken him. Tell him that a half-million is more insurance than my estate needs, but that he and I can get together on a good policy. I want to take one."
She nodded. He smiled at her. "I don't suppose HI see you again, Mrs. Mapes ... But I'm pleased that this evening happened to me-all of it."
Suddenly Paula was chilled at the nape of her neck. She felt an emptiness in the pit of her stomach. She did not want him to go. He had seemed like a gray cipher when she met him, but all that had changed. She saw now what the whole world saw in him.
She put out her hand. He touched it, his hands chilled.
For a moment he held her hand and neither of them spoke.
He sighed heavily, released her hand and turned to leave. He took a step away from her going toward the living room. He stumbled as if tripping over some invisible obstacle. He straightened and then sagged suddenly to his knees. He pressed both hands against his solar plexus, his head bowed.
Paula ran to him. "Cal! What's the matter? Is there anything I can do?"
He managed to shake his head. When she touched his shoulder he shook her hand away.
She stared at him a moment in horror and then ran to the divan where Bill sprawled on his back, snoring.
"Bill! Wake up! Something has happened to Mr. Oliver!"
Bill came awake unwillingly, fighting against it. Even when he sat up on the divan, he was barely conscious. His eyes were glazed, his hair stood on end about his head. He licked at his mouth and stared around groggily. "What's matter?"
Paula shook him. "It's Mr. Oliver. It's Cal, Bill! You've got to do something."
Bill recovered enough to stare at Cal sagging on the floor with his hands pressed to his chest. Bill said, "Get a doctor."
"No." The word was torn out of Cal. He shook his head. "Help me-to a chair-I'll be all right."
Bill got up, wavering. He lifted Cal easily, supporting hiim. He helped Oliver into the club chair.
Cal sat with his head back, breathing through his parted lips, gasping for breath with apparent oxygen hunger.
Paula stared at him, stunned with shock.
Bill said casually, "This is what happened to Cal at that poker party. Too much food. Too much to drink. Indigestion."
"Yes," Cal said. "Indigestion. Excitement. Too much to eat. It does that to me, Mrs. Mapes. I'm sorry."
"You look gray as a ghost," Paula said. "We'd better call your doctor."
"No. I'll be all right. I'll sit here a few minutes. Then I'll run on home. Can't tell you how sorry I am about this, Paula."
"Don't be foolish."
Bill stared down at him. "You can't go home, Cal. Not alone, and I'm in no condition to drive you there. You better spend the night."
"I couldn't think of it," Cal protested. "That much inconvenience."
"We got a guest room just waiting for you," Bill insisted. "No trouble at all."
At one o'clock Paula went into the guest room.
She wore a sheer pink nightgown with nothing over it. Her hair was brushed back from her face and her cheeks and lips were cleansed of make-up.
She had fought against being sent in to Cal, but Bill had commanded her.
Going along the hallway between the bedrooms, Paula told herself she would look in on Cal and then return to bed. This way she would be obeying Bill's unreasoning instructions and she would not disturb Cal. She was certain that he would not want to see her after his attack of indigestion, or whatever it was that had slammed him to his knees as if he'd been hit in the face.
She turned the handle slowly. The door parted silently. She winced seeing that the small bed lamp was burning.
She hesitated and then entered the guest bedroom.
Her face burned. There was no use pretending that she was any more than naked, even in the vague illumination of the night lamp.
Cal was awake, lying silently in the middle of the bed, his eyes opened. She knew he could see the outlines of her upthrust breasts, the color of her nipples, the rise of her stomach, the dark triangle at her thighs, the lines and nudity of her legs.
He stared at her as she crossed the room slowly to him.
She tried to ignore her nakedness though it wasn't easy with his gaze fixed hungrily on her breasts and thighs.
She said, "I was worried about you. I thought I'd look in on you. I didn't know the light would be on."
"I feel better with the light on."
"Are you all right?"
"I am now."
"Maybe we should call a doctor."
"No. I don't need a doctor. These attacks hit me once in a while. Excitement does it-the kind I experienced with you in my arms. I'll be all right. You go back to bed. Don't worry about me."
"Is there anything I can get you?"
"No." His eyes never left the beauty of her body revealed beneath that gown.
"Anything I can do for you?" Her voice lowered. She waited, standing beside his bed, near enough for him to touch, letting him look at her.
He looked at her because he could not help it. But he did not touch her.
He shook his head, the sadness and loss showing in his tired eyes.
Still she did not move.
"Would you like for me to-sit here with you for a while?" she said.
He flinched. He nodded. She sat on the bed near him, turned so that her breasts and her upper legs were revealed to him through the sheer fabric of her gown. He said at last, "Tell me one thing. Did Bill send you in here to me-like this?"
She gasped and caught her breath. Other men may have suspected that Bill sent her with her charms exposed to them, but none had ever put it into words.
Cal seemed to know what Bill planned, seemed to have known from the first.
Paula hesitated, terribly tempted to tell Cal the truth. But she could not. She was Bill's wife, no matter what he did to her, no matter what he forced her to do.
She had to pretend, no matter how much she had grown to hate the pretending.
"I don't know what you mean."
Cal brought his gaze up to her face, and for a moment he looked at her. She wanted to look away, to hide her gaze from him. But she met his eyes levelly.
After a moment Cal said, "I'm sorry, Paula."
"About what?"
"About my thoughts. I had no right to suggest such a thing. You have every right to turn me out-"
"You're too ill-"
"I had no right to say that, Paula. I should have known a woman like you would not be party to such a thing. I could believe first that my own wife would be so involved before I could believe it of you."
Paula felt ill. "I don't want to talk about it."
"We've got to," Cal said miserably. He sat up against the headboard, only the sheet covering the lower part of his body. Paula saw that he was built better than one would believe seeing him in his business suit.
"No."
"Yes. You've been nothing but kind to me-from the first. And I repaid it with an insult ... I cannot tell you how sorry I am-"
"Stop talking about it!"
"It's just that Bill has pressured me-from the first. The things he's done, trying to find my vulnerable weakness. He's a great salesman-but he's not one to let anything stand between him and his sales. For a moment there, it seemed to me that he could even force a lovely young woman like you to-help him by turning your charms on me ... But though Bill might do that ... I know you wouldn't. And I even know that Bill wouldn't ask it of a wife as sweet and pure as you. If you can forgive me, I'll get out in the morning, and I'll try to make up to you for that cruelty."
"I know you don't feel well. I shouldn't have come in here-like this-"
"You didn't know there'd be a light on."
She sighed. "Maybe it wasn't as easy for me to forget--what happened tonight as it was for you."
"Good Lord!" Cal laughed. "Forget? I'll never forget it. But I also know-as you do-that you're Bill Mapes's wife and nothing can come of anything-between us."
She nodded, lowering her gaze. But she did not move from his bed. "Still, maybe it'll be nice to dream on sometime-it won't hurt to dream, will it?"
"I hope not," he said. "If it does, I'm in for a lot of pain."
She smiled. "You're so nice. And I am worried about you. Please-lie down. Try to sleep!"
"Sleep?" Cal laughed again. "What do you think I am? I couldn't sleep after dancing with you in the sun room. I was lying here wondering how long a man could go without sleep when you came in. Now it's worse than ever."
She touched his bare arm. "You are so nice."
He stared at her. "But I'm only human, Paula. I'm very human and you're putting me to an extreme test."
"I don't mean to, but I don't want to go away right now, either. Lie down, try to rest. I'll stay here with you a while, if you'll let me."
""If I'll let you! Good Lord." He shoved down under the cover. She saw that he was rigid with excitement and need for her. But she also knew he was at war with himself. He was a man of honor and he had no right to take her-even though she was beside him waiting for it to happen.
Cal turned on his side, staring at her. Their gazes met, locked. She tried to smile, failed. Almost involuntarily she slid down along the bed until she was lying beside him.
A few inches separated them on die mattress.
"It's not real," Cal whispered. "I'm asleep. I'm dreaming all this."
"It's real. The way my heart is beating is real."
He smiled wanly. "Even if it's not real," he said, "I'd better enjoy it while I can-before I wake up."
"Yes," she said. She moved closer on the mattress, reaching down for him, her hand closing on him.
She heard him gasp with delight, and he did not fight against it any more.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Oh Cal!"
Paula said the words in a whispered wail, but they were just words without meaning or substance, and both of them knew this.
She moved closer to Cal on the bed as if she were cold. For some moments he held her like this, their bodies pressed together.
His hand moved down her lovely back, across the rise to her buttocks. His fingers closed on her flesh through the sheer gown.
The sound of their frenzied breathing was loud in the room. Cal gasped, "It's almost as though Bill could hear the way I'm breathing."
She smashed her lips over his instead of answering. She felt the rigidity of him pressing at her thighs. She gasped aloud, the building wildness of these past days hurtling her past reason.
At the wildness he recognized in her, Cal reacted slightly, but not in the way she'd anticipated.
He moved away from her, his voice dead. "We mustn't do this-we've no right."
She was past caring about right or wrong.
"You've driven me crazy," she accused him, "we can't stop now."
She thrust her hips forward, putting herself more urgently against him.
Cal sighed out heavily and kissed her, crushing her lips under his.
The rapid pounding of their hearts battered at each other. She became aware that Cal could no longer resist his desires for her. He caught the hem of her gown and brought it upward over her hips. His hand went in between her thighs.
"Turn off the light," she begged with her mouth against his.
"No!"
"Please."
"I've got to see you. To have a body as lovely as yours without looking at it is the worst kind of sin-and the Lord knows we are deep enough in sin."
She laughed in a kind of shivery pleasure and abandoned herself to him. He pulled her gown up over her hips, past her waist, baring her heated breasts.
And now her gown was up under her armpits.
"You'll think I'm a tramp," she protested halfheartedly.
"I'm beyond thinking anything except that you're lovely."
"Am I lovely?"
This was the one question he didn't have to answer in words. It was as if she saw the reflection of her nude body in his adoring face. His gaze moved everywhere, from her fine legs to her uprising breasts with pink, hard nipples.
"I want to see it all."
She lay still and let him explore her body with his eyes and his hands.
He bent his head over her and took a breast in his mouth, until in a fury of passion she caught his head in her hands and pressed him down upon her so his face was mashed between her breasts.
As she gasped, holding him like this, Cal pushed her legs apart and caressed her with his fingers, moving them faster and faster until she could barely breathe at all.
She bit her lips to keep from screaming out the torment of her lusts. He was good.
She sighed in a wild satisfaction because Cal knew how to please a woman, how to touch and excite her and to carry her to that pitch of anxiety where she truly belonged to him.
"Oh, Cal!"
She twisted and turned her hips, thrusting them up for him, letting him manipulate her body as if it were an instrument that he played to perfection.
She no longer was conscious of her nakedness.
When Cal sagged to the mattress in an agony of exhaustion, she swung her legs over him, sat across him, staring down at him in the vague light.
She caught the sheer gown and pulled it over her head. Her hair cascaded back around her face.
She saw him gazing up at her revealed body in delight. His hands moved over her body, cupping her breasts as she crouched over him.
She shifted herself and he bit his lip.
"Do you like that?"
He couldn't answer.
"And this?"
He was beyond speaking.
He lay still. He did not move because he did not have to. She moved herself faster and faster, sending her hips forward and then withdrawing them before she slashed downward upon him again in a fury of need.
"Easy, doll-"
"I can't go easy now!" she cried.
The bed had a deep mattress, a fine inner spring. It gave with the driving of her body, and soon the movements matched.
The bed itself quivered.
He closed his eyes and clung to her breasts. She rode faster and faster in incredible motions.
She lifted herself and drove downward, she bobbed and arched and quivered. She cried out.
"Oh! So wonderful! It's so wonderful I can't stand it!"
The bed shuddered, shaking under them.
Cal was aware of his hands clinging to her, the pain in his chest, the sweet agony in his whole body and then suddenly she crumpled down upon him, and they both lay still, neither able to move at all.
"Afraid I've got bad news for you, Bill."
The office manager of the insurance company tried to smile, but he could not quite make it.
Bill felt the premonition of big trouble.
He had learned to hide his concern behind a casual air. He slumped in a chair across the manager's desk, grinned. "How can I help you out of a hole this time, Tom?"
Tom Michelson was forty, thin, red-haired. He shook his head. "Wish it was like that, Bill. But it's something that I hate to tell you. Still, no sense putting it off. I'm afraid we've got to turn down the Cal Oliver application on that half-million of insurance."
"What?"
Bill sat forward.
He shook his head, feeling as if he'd been struck low in the groin.
He bit his lip hard to keep from throwing up. They couldn't do this to him. He had worked too hard, given up too much.
"You can't do this," he managed to whisper. The casual smiling was gone, and was replaced by a ghostly rigidity of the face muscles. He shook his head back and forth involuntarily.
"It's nothing we want to do, Bill," Tom said, "it hurts us as bad as it does you-"
"Oh, no."
"We're all sick about it."
Bill leaned against the desk. It took some moments for him to control the shaking in his belly, the illness that kept boiling up through his throat.
He saw Michelson only through a red occluding haze. It was as if a fiery fog had risen between them like a veil.
Tom's thin face reflected the feeling of compassion he felt for Bill. He said, "I know how long you've worked on this thing."
"You don't know," Bill said to nobody in particular, "you got no idea."
Tom winced. "If there was anything we could do, Bill."
"You mean-you're turning him down cold?"
"That's it, Bill. I can't tell you how sorry." Bill sank into the chair again and stared unseeing-at the floor.
Tom gazed at him a few moments in sympathy, then he pressed a button on his desk intercom.
Dr. Fred Kimble entered from the outer offices. He was a man in his late forties, with graying hair, a well-kept body. He wore a light-weight gray suit.
He sighed heavily when he saw Bill before Tom Michelson's desk.
"It showed up on Cal Oliver's electrocardiagram, Bill," the doctor explained. "I'm sorry."
"Couldn't you be wrong?"
Dr. Kimble shook his head. "There's no mistake.
When I saw that first EKG I had Oliver come in for a second test. It only confirmed what I already knew. He has a heart condition, Bill. Very serious."
Bill shook his head. "He swore he never had any heart trouble."
Dr. Kimble nodded. "Sure, that's what he told me. But he did mention those attacks of indigestion. They were small heart attacks. Some of them were really too small. They incapacitated him for varying lengths of time. Maybe he knew it was his heart but denied it, even to himself."
"Cal Oliver would have no reason for trying to defraud us on insurance-"
"The doctor isn't suggest that he tried to defraud us, Bill," Tom said. "It isn't that. Though such frauds are worked as often as it can be done, as you know. No. He was probably honest enough."
"Probably?" Bill stared at them. "He would have known he couldn't hide a heart condition like Dr. Kimble describes."
"That's why we believe he was honest." Dr. Kimble tried to smile. "It was inside himself where he was dishonest. He was dishonest with himself. He headed a big corporation; he had heavy responsibility, tensions, pressures. He didn't want to admit he had angina pectoris-because this would mean he was through in his business."
"Good Lord," Bill said.
"So he told himself and everybody else that he had indigestion. He stayed away from doctors until he had to have this insurance physical."
Bill stared down at his trembling hands. His mind kept running around and around in circles. A half-million-dollar policy lost. There had to be some way out. He had to be able to salvage something.
He said, "How bad is it, Doctor?"
"The worst, according to my diagnosis," Dr. Kimble said.
"But he's not even forty years old!"
"Age doesn't have too much to do with cardiovascular failures, Bill ... I'm sorry."
"But couldn't the company issue him some kind of policy?" Bill demanded, sweating.
Tom shook his head. "You know better than that."
"But the company could issue him a policy. Rate him up, the company does that all the time. Rate him high, but give me a chance to-"
"There's no rating for him, Bill," Dr. Kimble said. "It's as if he were alreadv dead. Walking around dead."
"It can't be that bad."
"But it is. It's worse because of the pressures and the tensions he's subjected to in his business. I hate to say this, Bill, but Cal Oliver could fall over dead-just like that." The doctor scowled, snapping his fingers to show how the business leader could go out with heart failure. He gazed at Bill and then at Tom Michelson a moment and added, "This diagnosis and prognosis of mine is off the record, of course. It goes beyond the scope of an insurance examination Still, what I say is true. He could drop dead any time."
Bill stepped down hard on the gas.
His Chrysler burned along the highway. He had no idea where he was. He did not care. Tears blurred his eyes and he kept his gaze on the road, his hands gripped the wheel, but he was not thinking about his driving.
Cars passed him and he did not see them. He saw roadside bars, and he wanted a drink, but he did not stop.
He couldn't talk to anybody yet.
His mind kept turning over this failure. He had reached for the brass ring, and he had missed.
He had sent Paula after Cal, sent her naked and passionate and with orders to debase and degrade herself for Oliver, to do anything that would make him buy that policy.
It was like the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. It was the chance of a lifetime. It meant the difference between being rich, and being poor-between success and failure.
He could have stopped using Paula to chase down the tough prospects and bring them to heel. Oliver's policy, along with others would have made him a person inside the insurance company.
He had been so near that place where he had fought so long to be-and he had fallen back, deeper than ever.
This affair with Cal had cost too much. There Was a wall between himself and Paula now.
He had told himself that when the Oliver deal was settled he could make it up to Paula, he would spend months making her forget.
Despite the fact that she had been unfaithful to him with Ed Jewel, he still loved her, and he still wanted her. The hatred that had gorged up in him died a long lingering death and he forced her to do things he would never have suggested had he not seen Paula and Ed on that bed together in wild, lustful embraces.
Still, he had been guilty of trespasses, too. He wanted to forgive Paula. He wanted her to forgive him.
The successful culmination of the Oliver deal would have made this possible.
But it was finished.
They were worse off than ever because they had dreamed ahead to what this would buy them, they had based their very hope of going on together on the way things would be-after the deal was cinched.
It was dark and Bill had no idea where the hot afternoon hours had gone.
He slowed the car, turned around on the highway, and headed back toward the city.
"Do it!"
Paula's voice rose to a keening wail.
She lay on the couch in her living room as the darkness smoked in through the windows.
Her sensuous body was nude except for high-heeled shoes she had forgotten to kick off, and her dress which Cal had pushed up over her breasts and under her armpits.
Cal leaned against the divan back rest, panting. "We've got to be careful, Paula!"
"Now's a hell of a time to talk about being careful!"
"Bill might walk in any minute." Her voice rasped at him. "You knew that when you started playing with me-"
"I couldn't help touching you-"
"And I couldn't help letting you-"
"I didn't mean-"
"Whether you did mean it or not, it got out of hand-"
"Lord yes." He tried to laugh at himself and his fearful need for her, a furious torture that increased steadily from that night in the guest room, weeks ago.
"Oh, Cal, please!" she begged, wriggling under him on the divan.
"I just wanted to touch your breasts," he whispered.
"Then touch them!"
"I just wanted to look at them one more time."
"Then look at them!"
"Suppose Bill comes home?"
"I told you! It's too late to worry about that." She reached for him, caught him, guided him to her. Her voice lashed at him. "Do it! You drove me crazy. Now you've got to do it!"
Excitement and thrilling passions burned through him at her touch, at the way she snuggled her hips up to him to accept him. Roughly he thrust himself upon her, driven to a fury by her unbridled desires, her naked flesh.
But he was not rough enough. "Harder!" she commanded. "Do it harder!"
"You want to kill me?" he gasped.
"Can you think of a better way to die?"
Cal laughed and thrust himself to her with all his strength and all the power of his growing need.
He had never wanted any woman as he wanted her.
There had never been any little sex-pot who knew all the intimate, tantalizing ways to drive a man past his will, and out of his mind.
And then he was unable to think anything, and the room spun about him as if they, the divan, and the house had gone into orbit.
Cal was sprawled asleep on the divan when Bill came into the front room a little after nine that night.
Bill stopped short, staring at the slender, gray-faced man on the divan. For a moment he was afraid that Cal was dead. Paula had confessed to him some of the frenzied love acts she performed for Cal-it was a wonder that he had lived through them.
He scowled, staring down at Oliver. It was strange and upsetting knowing this much about another human being, knowing that a death warrant had been issued on him.
For all his millions, Cal Oliver's life was ticking itself out, like a cheap watch. It was a matter of what-a month, days, hours? The next few minutes?
Was he dead? Bill shivered slightly, gazing down at him.
Paula entered from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw that she'd had a hasty shower and wore only a negligee and gown. It was as if she wanted Bill to know what she and Cal had been doing, a kind of punishment.
A way of letting Bill know how dead things were between them.
"Where have you been?" Paula said.
Bill shook his head and did not answer.
"I don't care," Paula said coldly. "I don't want you to think I care."
BUI jerked his head toward Cal on the divan. "Is he all right?"
Paula shrugged. "Of course he is. Why shouldn't he be?"
Bill bit his lip, looking at Paula. She had never looked more desirable than she did now, lost to him.
He caught her arm and led her from the room. She followed him into the kitchen.
He closed the door behind them.
"What's the matter with you?" she said.
"Nothing is the matter with me," Bill told her. "But him-in there. The insurance policy is off. The company won't issue it."
"What?"
"My reaction. Exactly. I told them they couldn't do this to me-to us. But they did. He has a coronary condition. Outside the farthest rating limit."
She shook her head. "Oh, no."
He saw her face crumple; and her eyes filled with tears. He felt an instant of shock. All her affairs had been a matter of cold business with him. It had never occurred to him that Paula could become emotionally involved like this with her casual lovers.
He pressed the back of his hand over his mouth. He had learned a bitter truth: no woman could give herself to any man-even the ones that did it for pay-without giving of herself something that she could never take back.
The sickness spread in him. He forgot the despair over the loss of the Oliver policy, thinking that he did not want to give Paula to any other man, the way he had been doing for these past two years.
"I didn't know," he said aloud.
Paula was crying into her hands. "Poor Cal," she whispered in heartbreak. "Oh, poor Cal. Do you think he knows?"
"I haven't told him yet."
"Must you?"
Bill frowned. "I've got to tell him he's been turned down by the company. He'll want to know why. If I don't tell him, he can learn the truth from the company doctor ... They got to be pretty good friends."
Paula's shoulders sagged. "Oh, the poor thing. How bad is it?"
Bill sighed. It rattled him and confused him and made him wild with jealousy that Paula was so deeply concerned about a man who was a stranger to him-and surely no more than a casual lover to Paula?
"Dr. Kimble said Cal could go out instantly-at any time. Pressures. Exertion, stimulation of any kind, excitement."
"Oh God." Paula pressed her fist against her mouth. Bill winced. "The kind of exertion you've been putting him through today, obviously." His voice was sharp.
Paula's head jerked up. "Whatever I've done with him, Bill, you started it. Don't you forget that."
"I didn't know you were going to care so much."
"Neither did I."
He retreated a step as if she had struck him. "You do care-deeply?"
"I didn't know how much," she admitted, "until you told me this now."
"Damn you!"
"What's the matter with you?"
"Do you mean this, or are you just trying to hit at me."
"Hit at you?"
"For the things I've made you do."
"Would I hit at you-especially at a moment like this?"
He flinched as if she'd scratched at him. "I wish you would. I'd feel as if you belonged to me-"
"Well, I don't."
"What are you talking about?" His voice rose. "Not any more I don't."
He caught her arms in his hands. "Stop it!" he commanded. "I won't have you talking and carrying on like this."
"You mean that you are jealous?"
"Yes. All right, I'm jealous."
She laughed suddenly in bitter, tear-filled irony. "How funny. After all this time. Now you're finally jealous."
"I can't help it"
Now she shrugged. "Neither can I. I tried to tell you, Bill, months ago. What you were doing to us-to me ... You killed everything between us."
"I don't believe that."
Her voice was flat. "It's true, whether you believe it or not. I tried to tell you."
"What's the matter with you? I needed you. I asked you to help me-"
"You forced me. You forced me to help you. I guess there are some things you can't make a woman do and still have her feel the same toward you any more."
"That's just words."
She shrugged. "They're the only words I seem to know."
He shook his head, staring at her helplessly. She turned and walked toward the closed door.
He spoke, almost in panic. "Where are you going?"
"In to Cal," she said. "I want to see if he's all right."
Bill stood unmoving, staring at the door when Paula closed it behind her. The house was quiet as if he were suddenly in a void of taut silence.
Almost at once the door was opened and Paula reentered, followed by Cal. He must have been standing in the next room. He looked hollow-eyed, gray and exhausted.
Suddenly Bill no longer felt compassion for Cal. He admitted he had chased Paula after Cal, but now he was jealous, and all jealousy is unreasoning.
It almost pleased Bill to strike at Cal with the truth about his coronary condition. Cal could take Paula's love-but nothing could save Cal's life.
He forced a sad smile and said, "Afraid I've got some bad news for you, Cal; it's about your insurance policy."
Cal's head tilted slightly. "They rated me up?"
"They turned you down."
For some moments nobody spoke.
Paula took Cal's arm, holding it against her breasts as if Bill were not present, or as if he no longer concerned her. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her voice was soft, compassionate. "Oh, Cal, I'm so sorry."
For the moment Cal was too shocked to react-to kindness or even to the scented nearness of Paula's lovely body or the deep concern in her eyes.
He saw nothing except the death warrant that Bill had handed him. He could think nothing else.
Cal shook his head. He said, "If you'll excuse me-I think I'll go home."
"Are you all right?" Paula said.
"Yes."
"You'll call me?" she persisted.
Cal nodded, hardly aware of her, or of anything outside his own stunned mind. "Yes. I'll call you."
He turned and walked slowly from the room, his shoulders slumped round. The horror of his heart condition had been put in official words now; he could no longer go on pretending, or ignoring it.
He left the door ajar.
Neither Bill nor Paula moved until they heard his car roll away in the drive.
Paula spoke, mostly to herself. "I feel like it's our fault."
"What?"
"All that's happened to him. Every thing."
"Don't be a fool. He had a heart condition for a long time. We had nothing to do with that."
Paula looked at him coldly. "It's nothing you would understand."
His voice hardened. "I understand this. You've got to forget him. Forget all about him."
"It's so easy when you say it."
"You're my wife."
"I'm nothing to you. Not any more."
He flinched as if she'd struck him. "I don't believe that, Paula."
She shrugged. Her mouth pulled into a wry smile. "That's up to you."
She turned and walked out of the room. He said, "Where are you going?"
"Oh, I'm not going to leave you. Not tonight. I don't know yet what I'm going to do. Right now, I'm going to bed. Good night, Bill."
He sat down at the kitchen table. It occurred to him that he had not eaten since breakfast. He did not care. He was not hungry.
He stared down at his hands. They were shaking. He had lost Paula. She hated him. No. He shook his head. He would not believe she hated him. Whatever he had done, it had been for both of them. He had never stopped loving her, not really, not even when she cheated on him with Ed Jewel.
He nodded. He just had to make her see how it was with him, how much he wanted for both of them. He would make it up to her, he would make her forget she had felt rage and hatred toward him.
He paced the room, returned to his chair. He could save everything. It was just that he had to think of some way out of this mess. He had to, or lose everything.
He was still sitting in that chair at dawn.
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning Paula got up listlessly. She brushed her hair and pulled on a house dress that accented the rise of her breasts, the swell of her stomach, the length and shapeliness of her long legs.
"Cal will like me in this dress," she thought. Then she stopped as if chilled. Cal couldn't look at her like this, or naked, any more. She had come to love what he did to her, he knew all the formulas for rousing her past ecstasy, but that was all over. She must not see him again. She had to stop thinking about him for the sake of her own sanity.
But it was easier to tell herself to forget Cal than it was to force herself to do it. She neglected her house work. She wandered emptily through the empty house. When the phone rang, she stared at it, shaking her head.
She knew it was Cal calling her even before she lifted the receiver.
"I want to see you, Paula," Cal said. There was urgency in his voice, the need to gaze adoringly at her shapely buttocks, at the gentle bounce of her breasts. This made it worse for her, because the thing Cal wanted most was the ultimate peril for him. "I've got to see you. Right now."
"No."
"No. What do you mean?"
"I can't see you any more, Cal."
"Why not?"
"I've hurt you enough." Her voice was dead. "Hurt me? I never even knew what heaven was until I found you. I need it now more than ever-"
"No."
"You can't just stop seeing me like this-"
"I've got to."
"Just let me talk to you-"
"I can't-"
"Listen to me! Good Lord, you wouldn't take drugs from an addict without a decent period of adjustment-"
"You're in worse condition than-"
"I am if I don't see you. I don't live if I don't see you."
"I'm going to hang up now, Cal."
"Don't do it!" His voice showed its panic. "If you do I'll come over there."
"Don't do it, Cal. It won't make it any easier on either one of us. It's over. It's got to be over."
"It won't be over until I'm dead."
She shuddered at this thought. "And I won't be the cause of your death!"
"You'll cause my death a lot quicker by refusing to see me than by meeting me for a cup of coffee."
"Coffee?" She laughed hollowly. "You know better than that. We'd never stop with coffee."
"I will. If you'll see me. Just this morning. Just let me talk to you."
"Nothing but coffee?" she said.
"I promise."
She sat across the booth from Cal, twenty minutes later in the shopping center drug store lunch area. Looking at him she felt a need to cry, and a need to be loved. What was there about one man above all others who could sdr this need in you?
She took a drink of black coffee, warning herself that she had to forget what she had had with Cal, what she might have with him. No matter what happened between her and Bill, this affair with Cal was finished-it had to be, for his sake.
"You never looked lovelier than through that coffee steam," Cal said. She saw his hands were shaking slightly, and his gaze was fixed on the hardening of her nipples.
"Oh, Cal, we mustn't," Paula protested miserably.
"Let's get out of here."
"Cal, you know we can't."
"You don't want to." He shook his head. "I don't blame you. An invalid. Nobody wants a man like me when he's an invalid besides-"
"What are you talking about!" She sat straighter. If he only knew how stirred she was, the warmth in her loins, the tautening of her nipples, the need for him to relieve the agonized longings tormenting her.
But she couldn't tell him. This would make it all worse.
"Let's go for a ride," he said. "At least there won't be people around staring at us. At least I can hold your hand. I can look at you."
Paula sat across the seat from Cal in his Caddy Coupe de Ville. She leaned against the door framing, chilled to be so far from him. But she had no right to tempt him, no right to allow herself to go beyond the point of no return.
Her dress was hiked far above her knees. There was nothing she could do about this. Cal reached over, put his hand between her legs, feeling the heat of her inner thighs.
"Oh, Cal."
"It can't kill me just to hold your leg like this, can it?"
"It's killing me," she said.
Cal said, "Paula, I had to see you because I had to get one thing settled. I see it is even worse with you than I feared. It makes me feel a little better because it makes me know that you love me more than I had any reason to believe."
She sighed. "I love you more than I had any idea I did. I never knew how much-until I learned how ill you are."
"That's it! I'm not ill! Look at it this way. I've got a bad heart. I've had it for years. I wasn't sure, but only because I wouldn't let myself be sure. But I've lived with it. No matter how long I go on living, or how briefly, I've got to go on living with it. But a car might plow into us right now and take me off to hades or wherever I'm going-much faster than my heart could do it. Don't you see that?"
"I see only one thing. I love you too much to be the cause of your death."
He laughed, pleased to hear the word love from her. This was the one word that had not passed between them all these weeks no matter how passionate they became, locked in ecstatic embrace. They never spoke of love.
Now the word changed everything between them. I love you too much to be the cause of your death.
"It's good to hear that you love me. But it's also an evil thing. Can't I make you understand, Paula, there are all kinds of death? Death is inevitable, but living death is the worst kind."
"I don't know what you mean," Paula protested.
Cal pulled the car off the highway, drove along a secondary road, parked overlooking a lonely creek. From the roads the whispery sounds of hurrying cars mixed with the hammock sounds of birds and small animals. Sun glittered moistly on the face of the water.
"This is what I mean," Cal said, turning on the seat to look at her. He did not touch her for the moment. "To be denied you, though I live, this would be the worst kind of death."
She spoke in panic. "I've got to help you stay alive-in spite of yourself."
His voice had irony in it. "Stay alive for what?"
"Oh, Cal, don't. You're trying to mix me up. You have so much to live for. A huge business. People who depend on you. Your profession."
"Without you I don't have anything," he said softly.
"Oh, don't. It was wrong before. I admit that. There is no way to justify what I have done with you. I've been Bill's wife all the times I've gone wild in your arms. But it would be more wrong now-to let you do it when I know it might kill you."
He gazed at her, his eyes bleak. "Then you don't want to see me any more."
Her eyes brimmed with tears. "Oh, Cal, don't! You know that isn't what I want. But that's the way it's got to be!"
"Why?"
"Must you make me say the words, when you know them as well as I do?"
Now he touched her leg again, sliding his slender hand far up under her dress. She shivered at his touch. She did not move. She stared at his hand loving her.
"I make you say the words," he said, "because I hope you'll see how empty they are. They are not valid. They don't make sense. I wouldn't want to live-no matter how safe I might be-if I couldn't enjoy your beauty."
Tears streamed down her rigid cheeks. He reached over, loosened her dress, rolled it down over her shoulders, past her upthrust breasts. He reached around her, unsnapped her bra. The glorious globes spilled free. He sat for some moments in mute admiration.
"Oh, Cal," she whispered.
He did not speak. He bent his head and took a breast in his mouth. She pressed his head into the firm, heated resiliency. He suckled at her breast and she moaned, making little whimpering sounds of delight. He loved her with his fingers pushed under her dress. Gradually she lay back, her breasts exposed, her legs wide apart, its hem around her waist, her thighs open for him to hold and look at and love.
She laid her head back and closed her eyes.
For some moments they stayed like this in silence, her protesting whimpers, her arching hips as he stroked her down there, the sound of his kissing at her breasts, the intensity of their breathing.
He moved away and Paula lunged upward, covering her taut breasts with her arms, afraid that someone had driven up near them. She would not have heard them through the thunder of blood in her temples.
But Cal was only starting the car.
"Where are we going?" she whispered.
"To a motel."
"Oh, Cal, take me home."
"Not yet. Even if I never have you again, I've got to have you this last time."
She nodded, snuggling down against him.
Inside the motel room, she trembled. She was more nervous than she had ever been. It was as if she had never been alone with a man before.
Cal said, "Would you like a drink?" Her teeth chattered. She shook her head. "No. Not now. Would you?"
"I don't need anything but you."
"Yes."
He sat on the bed. "Let me watch you strip off your clothes."
"All right."
She stood before him. She looked down at him, thinking that she had to be good. This might be the most expensive lovemaking in his life. It might cost him his life. He thought she was worth it.
She had to be worth it.
She tugged her loosened dress over her head. Her hair fell loose about her face, giving her a wanton look. She saw her reflection in the mirrors. It excited her, seeing her body, seeing the way Cal watched her undress.
She watched him move his gaze along the curve and sleek smoothness of her legs. She was glad she had nice legs for him. They were long, maybe slender, but elegantly proportioned. Her skin was the gold of new minted coins, rising up to a touch of sable darkness when she pulled down her panties.
For a moment then she stood wearing only her bra and high-heeled slippers.
"The bra," he whispered.
She nodded and put her arms up between her shoulder blades. She loosened the bra and let it fall to the floor with the other apparel. She did not look toward it, and neither did Cal.
"Now you," she whispered.
Cal protested, but she insisted that she lie back on the bed and she unbuttoned his shirt, removed his trousers, tugged off his shoes.
She saw that Cal was throbbingly ready for her. Shivers of anticipation thrilled through her.
She smiled.
"What are you laughing at?" Cal asked.
"It's funny, that's all. I was nervous when I had my clothes on. Now that I'm naked I'm not nervous any more."
He agreed. "There's nothing to be nervous about."
"No."
He tried to sit up, reaching for her, but she placed her hands against his shoulders and pushed him back.
She bent over him, her breasts suspended like ripened fruit about to topple into his mouth.
"Lie still," she said.
"Why?"
"I want to love you."
"No." He sat up.
He caught her and pulled her down on the bed beside him. She was always astonished that such a slender man could be so strong.
"What's the matter?" she cried.
"I don't want you to be gentle!" he said. "I don't want you trying to protect me. Not at a moment like this. I want you-and I'm going to have you. All of you."
She knew there was no sense in fighting against him. And she was too weak with desire to fight anyhow.
His eyes roved over her body. His hands smoothed along her nude back, closing on her sleek bottom. She quivered at his touch. She lay quiescent, waiting while he felt her breasts and nuzzled them, and moved his hands in the darkness at her thighs. Her legs parted and she responded to him without words.
He rose above her and came down between her legs. She gasped slightly and locked her ankles about him. She arched her back, shoving herself upward to him eagerly.
She tried to remember she had to be careful, but she could not remember anything except the delight that he awakened in her body. She closed her arms about him, her fingers digging into him.
Their mouths clung.
Her kisses were heated. Her lips parted and his tongue thrust deep inside, probing.
She kissed him and loved him with her hands, and her hips flayed violently, her breasts bounced as if her pounding heart were shaking them.
She worked faster and faster with her hips in their locked embrace. She had never felt wilder with need. No one had ever roused her to such heights.
He sweated and she heard him gasping like a fish out of water, but she could do nothing except obey the instincts of her body, and these commanded her to move faster, and faster and faster.
She was wailing in her delight, wanting it to last forever, and knowing that it couldn't last an instant longer.
It didn't.
They clung to each other and hit the highest crest of lust and delight, suspended there for a moment before they plunged downward into the soft warm dark of perfect mutual satisfaction.
They were so perfect together, she thought.
Cal didn't move. He toppled away from her and lay still across the rumpled bed. For a long time she was too weak to think or to move. But after while, panic swirled inside her because it was not like Cal to lie beside her without touching at her, her thighs, her breasts, her legs, as if he could never get enough of her loveliness.
Frightened, she sat up beside him in the chill of the air-conditioned room.
She gazed down at him. His face was thin, gray, and rigid. His eyes were closed.
She shook her head, the panic building.
"Cal!"
He did not answer. He did not move.
"Oh, Cal! My God, Cal."
She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him.
"Cal!" The sound was a wail. She didn't recognize her own voice.
When he still did not move, Paula went mindless in her panic. She pleaded with him, then jumped up and reached for the telephone.
He stirred on the bed.
Holding the telephone, she gazed at him. The operator repeated, "Yes. Motel Office. Yes. What is it?" Cal shook his head at her.
Sighing, Paula replaced the receiver. But she knelt over him, worried. "We've got to call a doctor-"
"You need help."
"No. I'm all right."
"You were out. You were all the way out." He managed to smile. Gradually slight color returned to his cheeks and he focused his eyes on her
"Yes," he agreed, "I was out. It wasn't the first time."
She frowned. "What?"
"You've knocked me out before. You are a very violent gal, whether you believe it or not. You've knocked me out, but you never knew about my heart before, and so it never worried you."
She cried out. "We've got to stop this!"
Cal drew her down upon him, holding her naked body upon his. He caressed her gently, stroking her buttocks.
"Don't you understand yet, Paula? For the first time in my life I've found just what I've always been looking for."
"It's going to kill you."
"I've told you. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of being alive-dead without you."
"You've got to get used to it. I know now-after seeing you like this, I couldn't stand to be the cause...."
She stopped, unable to say the tragic final word. Death had never seemed as real or as terrible as it did in this moment.
"I've got to love you or I die," Cal whispered. "No. It's too dangerous."
"It'll do, until they invent a better way to die," Cal told her.
His hands tightened oil her breasts.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bill sat at the bar and watched the cocktail waitress over the brim of his second martini glass.
She looked to be in her late teens-too young to drink, anyhow-though he supposed she was older. There was a look of virginity about her if not chasteness.
She wore a brief white skirt and a pink sweater that appeared to have been short-knitted over her bulbous breasts. Every man in the place kept his gaze on the pertness of her trim young bottom tacking between tables. But even with a young and lush attraction like this to concentrate upon, Bill couldn't escape the sense of depression and loss.
He knew he was drinking too much but perversely he ordered another martini.
"Hurting nobody but myself," he muttered aloud.
"What'd you say, doll?" He had not realized that the pert little waitress had paused beside him, so near she overheard him, and also so near that his elbow brushed her resilient young breast.
He turned and stared at her, then dropped his gaze to her boobies. "I don't believe they're real."
"They're real all right, doll."
"I wouldn't believe it without the taste test," he teased.
"You'll make me spill my drinks talking to me like that," she said.
"You make me spill my drinks every time you pass," he said.
"You are nice."
She moved away, and looked back, pleased with him. He should have felt better, but he didn't.
Turning he saw Cal Oliver standing where the girl had been, and knew why he felt so low.
Cal nodded to him, smiling, but looking guilty and slightly unhappy. Somehow it pleased Bill to think he could break him in two if he wanted to. Of course, he didn't want to, but....
"What are you drinking?" Cal said.
"Martini."
Cal ordered two more and then looked around. It displeased Bill that Cal gave the pretty little waitress barely more than a passing glance. She was lovely, fresh and new, but of course Cal's mind was elsewhere.
Cal was being faithful to Bill's wife.
They talked casually, in disjointed bits and pieces, while Cal finished off the martial. It took him a long time. Cal was no drinker.
"Have another one," Bill suggested.
Cal shook his head and smiled. "I better not. I need a clear head. Something terrible has happened, Bill. That's why I asked you to meet me here. I thought we ought to talk about it."
Bill drew a deep breath and nodded. He didn't say anything. The cocktail waitress passed. He let his gaze stroke across the escarpment of her breasts. Her bottom twitched slightly and she smiled at him, shaking her head. It was there, he thought, waiting for him. Another time, it might be waiting for another man, but today he was the one. As far as she was concerned there was no other male in the room. And all the other men knew this, too. This would have tilted Bill's ego at any other moment in his life, but just now he couldn't make himself care. His gaze touched at her name embroidered across the upthrust expanse of her left breast, Prue.
"We ought to talk," Cal said again, lamely.
Bill shrugged. "So talk."
"You're an intelligent man, Bill, so I don't suggest you haven't suspected-"
"Don't butter me up, just say whatever it is that's bugging you."
"I'm in love with your wife."
Bill winced. He forced himself to go on smiling. "Sure you are," he said lightly-a lightness he had not truly felt in weeks, "She's a lovely dish. It happens to everybody sooner or later."
"You don't understand-"
"I understand. You want Paula, and you're too honorable to do anything but talk about it-"
"Would you prefer I sneaked around behind your back?"
"Are you suggesting that you haven't been?" Cal straightened slightly. "You're being pretty rough about this."
"Did you expect smiles?"
"It's something that's happened to us, Bill. To Paula. To me. We are in love. I'm trying to do the honest thing by telling you about it."
Bill spoke coldly. "So you're in love with my wife. What do you want from me-a medal?"
Cal tried to smile. "I deserve a bullet, maybe. But as I told you. It got out of hand. It is nothing I wanted. I know what this would have done to me if some man had come to me and told me that he had been seeing my wife and had fallen in love with her. I know there is nothing I can say to justify it, or make it right-"
"But you just wanted to talk about it?"
"Not at all. That was the last thing I wanted. But I'm trying to be truthful with you-finally-and honorable, and all the other traits you obviously associate with the boy scout movement. But I did come directly to you."
Bill straightened on the bar stool. "Bully for you. You've been honest with me. Now I'll be honest with you."
Cal winced. "Please do."
"You love my wife. Unfortunately for you, so do I. And she is my wife. So the best thing I can tell you is to stay to hell away from her."
There was a brief taut silence. But Cal shook his head. "I'm afraid it's not that simple."
"Well it is to me, and that's the way I want to keep it."
"It's too late for that."
Bill kept his voice low. "It's not too late for you to stay away from her."
"I didn't mean that," Cal said with a chill in his tone. "It's too late for you. That's what I meant."
"Oh?"
"Your wife doesn't love you, Bill. Not any more. She says she has not loved you-for a long time-long before she met me."
"I'll have to face that. It's my problem."
"No. It's our problem."
"I don't think so. She's still my wife."
"But it's me she loves."
Bill did not speak. Sure, it's you she loves, he thought. It's anybody but me. I was rough on her. But I tried to give her the things you'd be able to give her without thinking twice about it. We went through something you couldn't even understand, trying for things that you bought casually. He shivered slightly.
"Do you understand?" Cal persisted. "She no longer loves you. She is in love with me. It is nothing I wanted to do to you. But that's the way it is. She loves me."
Bill trembled. He lightened his hand on his martini glass. He felt chilled. He should have been drunk enough to roll with the shock, but it didn't work like that. He was sober and it hurt like hell.
"I'd have to hear that from her," he said.
"Yes. But I must caution you. Be easy on her. Anything you do to her from now on, you're also doing to me."
"I'll keep that in mind," Bill said.
"He wants to marry you," Bill said to Paula.
They stared at each other across the small blue ice-cream table in the kitchen.
"Cal wants to marry you," Bill repeated.
Something flickered across Paula's eyes. She tried to meet Bill's gaze directly, but she simply could not do it.
"Is that so very hard for you to understand?" she asked.
"It's kind of messy," he told her. "Why?"
He stared at his clenched fist on the table before her. "Doesn't seem messy to you?"
"No. Why should it? We're being as honest with you as we can, Bill. I don't see what's messy about that."
"You're my wife."
"No."
"Oh, yes you are. You're my wife until I let you go."
"You can keep me. Bill. But not forever, and it won't do you any good. Trying to keep me would be messy."
He waved Ids arm. "Look at me!"
"I'm looking at you, Bill."
"This is us. You and me. We didn't just meet casually a few weeks ago. We've been married for years. You were so crazy about me that you cried for hours when I tried to break up with you-and what was it about? That fight? A guy named Ed Jewel?"
"That was a long time ago, Bill. It's like ancient history that I studied once in school. I remember it. But dimly."
"I remember it. Well."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not. Because that tells us what we are. We are two people that met and fell in love and got married, and we didn't have it easy ... That's why you're really leaving me, isn't it, just because we didn't have it easy-"
"Say whatever makes you feel better, Bill, it isn't going to change anything-"
"It's the truth. You blame me because I let you go to bed with a few guys so they would buy insurance from me. You know why I did that-"
"I don't care why. I hated it."
"Sure. You hated it. So you hated me. But I was trying to get money to buy you some of the things that you are going to have from Cal Oliver without trying. He can give you all the things I never could, that's the real reason why you're chucking me for him, isn't it?"
"I hadn't thought about that"
"Don't lie. What else is there to think about? A man that's rich-a millionaire. What could you want that he couldn't give you. All the things I had to struggle for-and still couldn't make. Easy with him. Why should you stay with me?"
"It was over-between us-before he came along."
"That's what you say. But you stayed. You moaned and you wailed when I loved you in bed, even so. But now he's here-a millionaire with a bad heart-and suddenly you can't stand the thought of living with me any more."
She stared at him. "Just what are you accusing me of?"
He looked at her, unflinching. "I'm accusing you of just what you've been thinking-ever since we heard the results of Oliver's medical examination-"
"You think I'm marrying him for his money?"
"Aren't you? It's been in your mind. It's in it now. You used to be a sweet sexy little girl with loving on the brain. But not any more. Now, you're above all that. You're in love with a wonderful man-"
"I am!"
"Sure you are. A wonderful man with a coronary condition. A poor sucker whose heart could stop on him any minute-and what would that do to you-make you a rich widow."
"Oh, Bill! Can you really and truly believe that about me?"
"I can't believe anything else. Can you? That's . what you want. Sure, I thought about it. The night I came home and found him sprawled out on that couch. I thought he was dead. I looked at him, and I thought how easy it would be for us-you'd divorce me and marry him-and when he kicked off, we'd have it-all of it."
She stared at him. "I can't believe you thought that."
"Why not?"
"Because you would have made me do it! Right then!"
"That shows you don't know me, doll. Not for all the years we've been married. You never knew I was aware you were bedding Jewel. You never really knew me at all. Well, I'll tell you. I decided against that marriage-you and Cal-because you meant too much to me. I was through with the whole sordid business--letting you put out to these tough-hanging customers, doing anything except being my wife."
For a long time neither of them spoke. They sat across the table in the silent kitchen.
At last, Paula said, "I'm sorry, Bill."
"About what?"
"Maybe I didn't know you. Maybe I should have been willing to sacrifice my body for you-to help you make money. I can see you wanted that money for what it would buy me ... Maybe that should have made it all right. But it didn't. And it doesn't now. I'm sorry."
"I love you, Paula."
"I'm sorry."
"I won't let you go."
"Don't fight me, Bill. I'm sorry. But I've made up my mind. I admit I loved you. I thought I would never love any other man as I loved you ... But times have changed, and I have changed-everything has changed ... I feel just as though I never truly loved you at all."
He laughed coldly. "Sure. How could you? I don't stack up very tall beside several million dollars, do I?"
She stood up and paused, looking down at him. "It's no good talking about it like this, Bill. I don't want to fight with you. That gets us nowhere. But I do want a divorce. If you won't give me one, I'll have to get one."
She held his gaze a moment. Her eyes glittered defiantly. Then her lids lowered, and she turned swiftly away.
Bill jumped up. "Where are you going?" he said.
"I'm going to bed ... We've nothing more to say to each other, Bill."
"There's more I want to say to you!"
"No. You just want to hurt me. You want to hit at me because I try to tell you the truth."
He strode after her and caught her arms. He turned her around roughly. He stared down at her. "Well, listen to this truth. You're not just walking out on me like this-"
"Oh, Bill. It's not just like this. We've been torn apart for a long time. It's gotten worse. Cal has nothing to do with that."
"Cal has nothing to do with this, either!" he said. He pulled her body in against his and smashed her mouth tightly to him. He held her savagely even when she refused to respond to him. "There's this between us," he panted, "and all the many years we've done it-"
"And all the years when I've lain needing it-and you didn't even want me."
"I want you now!" Bill spoke hoarsely. His hands clutched at her rounded buttocks, at the rise of her breasts. Roughly he pulled her dress away.
"This won't do any good, Bill!"
"Maybe it won't do you any good. But it will do me good. And it'll be something for you to remember when you're living with your millionaire who'll be worth nothing to you-as long as he's alive!"
She broke free, her face livid. "Bill! Stop talking like that. You have the sort of mind that would think of marrying a man like poor Cal for his money. I haven't ... I love him. I want to make him happy as long as I can ... That has nothing at all to do with you."
His hands caught her again. He mauled her, fondling her breasts without gentleness.
When he saw that she was not going to respond to him, he shoved her away roughly. "You've made up your mind, haven't you? You're going to have Cal's money, and nothing I can do will stop you."
"I'm going to marry Cal."
"I could stop that, easily."
She flinched, watching him. She knew what he meant. If he told about Ed Jewel, Greg, the other men in her life, she might still win her divorce, but she would lose Cal.
Paula shook her head. "Oh, Bill, no!"
"Oh, yes."
"Why would you do that?"
"Why not? I married you. I loved you. Maybe I did wrong asking some of the things I did of you. But still I loved you. But you've got a chance at a million dollars-"
"It's not that!"
"-you've got a chance at a million dollars and I'm in the way, so you're throwing me out-with nothing. Why shouldn't I stop you? I'd be doing Cal a favor. Anyhow, I'm getting nothing out of it."
She stared at him. "What do you want?"
"You."
"Oh, Bill."
He laughed coldly. "Maybe I'd agree quietly to the divorce and let you marry Cal Oliver if I got something out of it."
She watched him. "Go on."
"If you married him-but came back to me-with the loot when he kicks off."
She drew a deep breath. "And that's the only way you'll agree to the divorce?"
He nodded, smiling savagely, the hurt burning from the depths of his eyes. "That's right. You can divorce me. But not without a mess. The only way I'll step aside quietly is to know that you're coming back to me-with the money-when Cal Oliver is out of the way."
There was complete silence in the room for some moments.
Bill stared down at Paula's bowed head. She looked at the floor for a long time.
At last she tilted her head, looking up at him. Bill caught his breath slightly because there was a strange light in Paula's eyes that he had never seen before.
It was as if she were truly a stranger.
"All right," she said in a cold, level voice. "I'D agree to that."
Bill didn't move. She had agreed to his terms. He didn't know why he felt no elation. It was instead as if he were suddenly cold, and he shivered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Paula opened her eyes and wriggled in the stateroom bed. She yawned, still under the spell of a pleasant, unreal dream. In the dream she and Cal had been married in a J.P. office with a janitor as a witness. They had flown south to Miami, boarded a slow boat to the Caribbean sea. From their first moment alone together, their lives had been everything a honeymooning couple's life should be.
But lying there, she felt an instant of chill, a terror that it was all truly a dream.
For a moment she looked about in panic, not sure where she was.
Her gaze touched Cal sprawled on his stomach on the bed beside her. She smiled hugely, because her bed was rumpled, tousled, battered, but he had barely wrinkled the sheets on his bed when he finally toppled upon it in complete exhaustion sometime before dawn this morning.
She stretched luxuriously, like a cat, pleased with itself and filled with warm milk. Even the bed sheets-rumpled as they were-had a rich feel, as did the pure silk of her gown. Mrs. Calvin Oliver, III-even her name had a rich sound.
She smiled, gazing at the ceiling.' She was Mrs. Calvin Oliver, and it was as if her life began when she spoke her vows with him in that musty office. It all did have a dream-like quality, and yet it was real.
She got lazily out of her bed, feeling the gentle rise and roll of the luxury ship. The carpeting felt pleasant against her toes. She wriggled her feet, staring at them.
She pulled the gown over her head, hearing its expensive sound, almost like the rustling of money. She crumpled the rare fabric in her fist and tossed it carelessly to the floor just because it gave her a sense of power to do it.
Naked, she stood up and padded across the carpeting to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth, got under the shower. The water was just right-the way it would be all the rest of her life, she thought, because she would pay money to keep it that way.
The water peppered her, striking like small silver whips at all the erogenous zones of her nude body. She shivered with gratification.
"Is there room for two of us?"
She turned and Cal stood close behind her.
She gazed down at him and her eyes widened slightly and involuntarily because Cal was as rigid with desire for her as though he had not toppled away from her in exhaustion only a few hours ago.
"This isn't like any marriage I ever heard of," she said.
He had taken the rich, scented soap from her and was gently stroking it over her smooth skin. "Why not?"
"I thought when people got married they grew tired of each other," she said.
He laughed, soaping her most intimate portions of anatomy. She wriggled in delight and gave a small wail of ecstasy. "You'll drive me crazy."
She clung to him and let him soap her body, feeling the tear-warm water washing it all away, leaving her fresh and clean and scented for him. She told herself that it was symbolic, too: He was washing away all her past, all the other men she had ever known, even Bill.
She was aware that he was overwhelmed by the warmth and smoothness of her body, of the pleasures it promised. Her breasts stood round and firm, like a young girl's breasts, for him. Her body was new and perfect for him, but she was not too young-she was ripe.
Ripe for all the pleasures he could imagine. She stirred under the impact of the water and the performance of his hands. She was ready to be taken.
She was as warm and fluid as the shower water.
She wanted him to have her.
She had nothing else on her mind now. She felt heated and inflamed and shameless. Her nudity took away all her inhibitions. She told herself she knew how Eve must have felt in the Garden-before fig leaves.
She lifted herself up on her toes, arching her bottom forward, moving in upon Cal, taking him.
He gasped with delight and dropped the soap. The water went on splashing on their backs, their heads and shoulders. They were not aware of it. They were lost in what they were doing to each other.
She sagged back against the tiles of the shower. They were heated from the steam and the warmed water. She spread her legs wider. Her fingernails dug into him. She heard his labored breathing and she moved faster and faster and faster, carrying him with her to the most violent reaches of passion....
"Would you like to dance, Mrs. Oliver?"
Paula bit her lip when the young bachelor invited her to dance in the ship salon after dinner that night. But she wanted to dance with him, even when she hid her anticipation.
His name was Robert Eden. He ate with them at their table every day, and the whole ship was aware he had not taken his eyes from her.
But Cal was conscious of it, too.
She did not want to anger Cal. Things were going too well, even better than she had dreamed they might.
She could not let anything spoil it, not even a handsome young man.
And Robert was handsome. He was about six-feet tall, with red-gold hair that would have gone to tight curls if he had not worn it in a brushcut. His eyes were blue. But it was his body that excited her, despite the fact that she was getdng more loving then she'd bargained for, more than she had ever believed possible.
Still, it was as if she were learning a fact of life. Desire is in the mind and is only barely, if at all, controlled or influenced by the fatigues of the body.
There was something about Robert that aroused her even when she could not pin-point it at the moment: the width of those shoulders, the depth of his chest, the slender lines of his hips, his long legs, the aggressive youthfulness-and that indefinable something that attracted her by stirring memories in her.
Robert was bending across the table toward her, waiting. His blue eyes held a smiling and a challenge.
She exhaled, glancing at Cal. She forced herself to smile in a deprecatory way, "Do you mind if I dance with Mr. Eden, Cal?"
"Of course not," Cal said.
A tremor went through her. He said he didn't mind, but the words lied-it was in his tone. He minded. He cared. He was chilled with jealousy.
This was so unlike Bill. She had been used by Bill-he had forced her to dance with other men, to go to bed with them. He had never been jealous.
It made her happy to think that Cal cared, and was jealous. Wasn't this the way it was supposed to be when two people loved each other?
She gave Robert a dazzling smile. "I think not this time," she said.
The disappointment showed in his young face.
He walked away from the table. A few moments later she saw Robert dancing with one of the teen-age girls who had been pursuing him openly all during the cruise.
Cal touched her hand. "You should have danced."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you did mind. I could tell you did."
He gave her a wry smile. "Yes. I minded. But I'll get over it."
She laughed. "I don't want you to get over it I like you--just the way you are."
Cal woke up to a strange sound.
He opened his eyes in the tropical darkness, feeling oddly disembodied. He lifted his head from the pillow listening for the sound that had wakened him.
He heard it again. Paula was crying softly in her bed.
He sat up in the gray darkness. The ship seemed flying on oil instead of sailing through equatorial seas.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and moved to Paula.
He sat down beside her and pulled her over into his arms. Every other time he held her like this he felt a rush of desire. Now it was odd that he felt protective, as if she were a little girl crying in the dark and only he could soothe away her tears.
"Darling. What's the matter?" Cal said. He heard her teeth chatter ."I don't know." He laughed. "Oh, come on now. You're crying. You must know why you're crying."
"I don't. Not really."
Cal tightened his arms about her. "There's nothing you can't tell me, Paula. What's the matter?"
"Nothing. That's just it. There's nothing wrong. And everything's perfect. And I'm happy. That's it."
"You lost me somewhere."
"I feel guilty."
"Guilty?"
"Yes."
"Guilty. For what? About what? Why should you feel guilty because you're happy?"
"Do I have the right to be happy? After the way I've treated Bill."
"You made Bill happy, as long as you could."
"Yes. And you came along. And I walked out on him. I treated him badly."
He caressed her, holding her heated breasts in his hand, fondling her nipples. "No. You have a right to be happy. And you weren't happy with Bill."
"I was miserable."
"Stop worrying about it."
"But I vowed to love him."
"You did love him-when you took those vows. But you changed. Life changes. Life changes everybody, everything. Nothing ever stays the same. No matter how much wc want it to. If I could, I'd keep everything just the way it is now with us. But I can't. I know better. Everything changes-and somehow we have to go on. That's about all life does-change."
"I'll always love you."
"Sure you will. And I'm sure I'll always love you. But just because you couldn't go on loving Bill, that shouldn't make you unhappy. Be glad we found each other."
"I am!"
"Then don't think about it any more."
"Doesn't it worry you-that we might not have the right to be happy-at the cost of making Bill miserable?"
"No. It doesn't worry me. When my wife died, I thought my life was over. I thought I could never love again-I could barely go on living. I was depressed and miserable all the time. But I had to go on living whether I wanted to or not. And thank the good Lord I did, because I found you."
"You didn't hurt anyone-the way I hurt Bill."
"You've got to forget him."
"But I'm so happy with you-I'm afraid it can't last-because of the way I treated him."
"Hell go on. Just as I had to when I lost my wife-"
"Nobody took her from you-"
"Death took her-and that's even more final than another man."
"No. That's something different. You can't hate yourself when death takes someone away-but you'd live with hate if another man-"
"Yes. I guess I would ... I know I was jealous tonight when that young boy wanted to dance with you."
"That's so foolish. Why would I look at a young boy like that-when I've got you."
He tried to laugh. "It beats me." He exhaled. "He watches you all the time. He can't take his eyes off of you. He wants you. And the devil of it is, I can't blame him. If he only knew what you were really like in this bed, he'd go mad with wanting you."
"Would he? What am I like?"
"Like all the she-devils since time began. Just holding you like this sets me wild."
"Show me."
His hands moved on her and he was trying to show her. She relaxed and closed her eyes. Her tears were gone. Soon she had forgotten Bill and any hurt she had done to him. He saw this for certain in the way she arched her back and bounced her bottom, clinging to him.
But something else nagged at him, something as persistent as it was foolish. Yet he could not escape it. She had forgotten Bill, but he could not be sure she had forgotten that young man named Robert. There was a new wildness in her passion tonight.
Loving her nude body, and feeling her rise on new crests of passion, Cal felt chilled. He had to stifle that jealousy. Jealousy was mindless, unreasoning, the surest sign of inner insecurity. Just because Paula had left Bill for him, this in no way meant she would leave him for some younger man like Robert Eden, did it?
Did it?
Bill's car wavered making the turn into his driveway. He got out of the car, staggering slightly. The house and the yard spun dizzily. He forced himself to stand straighter. He was no drunker than usual. He always kept a few drinks in him, and he had since the divorce.
It made things easier.
He fought his key into the front door and entered the house. It had the empty silence of abandoned places, the smell of heat and closed windows.
He said, "Paula."
He laughed savagely. Paula wasn't here. She had not been here for a long time. She would never be here again. He had to remember that.
No. There was something else he should remember. Something that made him feel better. But for the moment he could not think what it was.
He left the front door standing open. He walked unsteadily into the kitchen. Table, drainboard and sink were all littered with soiled dishes and debris. He shuddered. He opened the refrigerator, took out a beer can and tore off the tab top.
He wandered through the house drinking from the beer can. He stood a long time in the bedroom he had shared for years with Paula. There was no longer even the haunting scent of her in here. There was only the mustiness, the stale odor.
He turned and strode out.
The pretty little cocktail waitress paused at the dark booth when Bill sagged into it
He grinned loosely at her, his gaze fixed on the name sewn across the high expanse of her left breast: Prue.
"What a pretty place for a name, Prue."
"Hello, stranger. I haven't seen you in a long time," she said. There was the suggestion of a pout in her face. No woman, no matter how young, likes to choose a man-even temporarily-and have him turn his back on her.
"Been away," Bill lied. "But I came back to see you-soon as I could."
She smiled, mollified. "I wondered when I would see you again."
"Here I am, Prue."
"Shall I get you a drink?"
"A drink is the last thing I need."
She nodded. "You do look a little worse for wear."
"Nothing that couldn't be fixed up-if I got what I needed."
She smiled and wriggled her bottom a little, pressing herself against the table leaf. "And what's that?"
"Not here," Bill said, pressing the back of his hand against the thigh she pushed upon his table. "When do you get off from here?"
"Not until two a.m.," she said in evident regret.
"Two o'clock!" Bill shook his head. "I might be dead by then."
"I'd like to go somewhere with you-but I can't."
He shrugged. "Maybe some other life time, Prue."
She bit her lip, trying to think of some compromise. She was called away. He watched her shapely bottom work as she walked. It seemed to him that if anything could make him forget Paula quickly and completely, it ought to be a little sexpot like Prue.
He tilted his head and found a smiling face fixed on his from the bar. The woman was a blonde. She was alone. She was older than Prue, not nearly as lovely, but available, and this weighed heavily in her favor.
He smiled blandly back at her, nodded. Then he motioned with his head for the blonde to join him.
She got off the stool without hesitation and came back to his booth. He tried to get to his feet. "That's all right, hon," she said. "You just stay where you are."
She slid into the booth across the table from him, "My name's Constance," she said.
"Lovely name. Constance. What you drinking, Constance?"
"Oh, a martini will be fine-" she waited for him to supply his name. When he didn't say anything, Constance waved her hand imperiously, summoning Prue.
The little waitress's eyes crackled as she stood beside the booth. Her voice was low, but savage, "Get away from here, Constance."
Constance stared at her. "What's the matter with you?"
"This is my friend," Prue said. "He came in here to see me. I want you to get away from him."
Bill chuckled. Wasn't this a kick in the head? He had two dames fighting over him. This should have made him feel better.
Somehow it did not.
He remained chilled, and empty, and abandoned.
"How about it, hon?" Constance said. "You want me to stay?"
Bill grinned at her. Between Constance and the full-boobed Prue there was no contest. Strictly no contest. He shook his head, "I'm sorry, but I'm engaged to Prue. I should have told you."
"You're a liar," Constance said. But she got up, her head tilted. She walked away.
Bill heard Prue's expansive sigh. She leaned over him. "You won't be sorry, hon," she whispered.
"I'm not sorry."
Prue giggled. "I've already made arrangements to get off early. You looked good to me the first time I saw you-and I been waiting a long time for you to come back."
Bill signed for a hotel room near the bar where he'd met Prue. She clung to his arm, her brief cocktail uniform hidden under a brown cloth coat. Looking down at her, Bill found some kind of irony in thinking about his taking a doll like Prue to a cheap hotel room while his ex-wife rolled around with a millionaire.
He winced. Maybe he had asked for it, the way he had treated Paula when he had her. One thing sure, he had gotten it, in spades.
"Come on," Prue said, hurrying him toward the aged elevator. "Like I told you, hon. I've been waiting a long time for you."
The hotel room was sparsely furnished, but Bill barely looked at it because the furnishings didn't matter anyhow. There was a bed. This mattered.
Prue had brought a bottle from the cocktail lounge. Now she rounded up glasses and ice. She shook off her coat and poured drinks for them.
Bill sagged into an old club chair under a lamp. He reached up, snapped off the light.
Prue held out his drink to him. "Cheers, Hon," she said.
Bill shook his head. "I don't think I need it," he said.
She frowned slightly, but drank them both off quickly. "Been a long night," she said. "And a long wait. Did I tell you how good you looked to me?"
He didn't say anything.
"Hey!" she laughed, wriggling her shapely body before him in the garish lighted room. "You're not going to pass out on me, are you?"
"Heaven will applaud my performance with you," he promised.
"Well, I hope so." She toppled into his arms and began to kiss him.
Bill shivered, feeling his first premonition that things were wrong in this strange night. He was afraid he didn't want this girl. He was suddenly in panic because he was afraid nothing she could do would make him want her.
Bill clung to Prue, frightened. What was the matter with him?
"Oh, honey," she said. "You're so nice."
She snuggled down into his lap and he fondled her, removing the skin-tight sweater and tossing it to the floor. Now I won't know what your name is," he teased her.
She pushed her full breasts up and let him caress them through her sheer bra. He pushed his fingers in under her brief panties. She responded instantly, breathing loudly and shifting her hips to make access to her thighs easier for him.
"Oh, you drive me crazy," she whispered.
But Bill didn't say anything because he was realizing more and more that Prue left him cold.
He swore inwardly because this didn't make sense. She was a lovely little vixen with breasts that almost invited skis. She was eager for him. There was nothing phony about the passion she confessed, in the way she wriggled in his arms.
She tried to twist herself around so she would be sitting across his lap in the chair, but he wouldn't let her because he didn't want her to know that he was far less excited than she was. And a man had to be ready-or a party like this couldn't get off the ground!
Was he ruined for all women? Had Paula taken his self-confidence when she walked out on him.
He suddenly needed a drink. He got up abruptly and spilled Prue to the floor.
She landed hard on her well-padded little bottom. She cried out, "Hey! What's the matter?"
But Bill didn't even look at her until he drank greedily from the mouth of the bottle. Then he turned and looked at her.
She got up slowly, watching him. She was not smiling. "You're not going to pass out on me, are you?" she asked warily.
"Heaven will applaud," he said. She didn't seem so sure.
She came to him and pressed herself against him. She put her arms around him and let her hands love him. She slipped off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. She removed his shirt, loosened his trousers so they fell down about his ankles.
She giggled. "There. That's better."
She peeled away his shirt and ran her hands over the muscles and the hair on his chest. She hugged herself to him and her buttocks constricted when she pressed close. She was breathing harder than ever now.
"I really want you," she moaned.
"You've still got clothes on," he said, stalling.
"So what? Can't you move a few little pieces of clothes?"
"You do it," he ordered. "I want to watch you."
Prue was a vain little wanton, and his watching her undress thrilled her. She stripped away her clothes almost like a professional dancer, trying to torment him. He watched her bared breasts bouncing.
She rolled the brief panties down along her legs and when she stepped out of them, she was naked.
She caught his hand and pressed it upon her taut, ripe young breasts.
She clung to his hand and led him to the bed. She lay 'down across it on her back and gazed up at him, smiling invitingly.
She was nude now, and trembling with lust. She touched him. She frowned because he was not ready for her.
For a moment he thought it was over. He was afraid she would walk out on him and he would never blame her. She had done everything to excite him. This was insulting.
But Prue was too young and too sure of her charms to bother with being insulted. He saw too that he was not the first man who for one reason or another had trouble. She pushed up against him, smoothing her naked breasts against him.
She pulled him down on the bed and ran her hands over his body. There was an urgency in her hands and he responded to it despite his fears that he could not.
"It's all right, darling," she crooned. "I'll do something special-just for you."
He didn't speak. He lay back on the bed. His eyes were closed but he was acutely conscious of the special things she was doing just for him.
He felt the pressures of her breast, and the frantic way her heart pounded.
He opened his eyes and looked down at her. It pleased him that she liked this. She liked driving a man past reason because the excitement carried her along with it. Paula had been like that once.
Thoughts of Paula crowded back into his mind. He recalled the most thrilling things they had done together. He longed for her and he wanted her, and the wilder. Prue became with the sweet hotness of her embraces, the more convinced he became in his mind that he was with Paula after all.
The excitement surged through him. The little girl loving him cried out in pleasure at what was happening.
She threw herself upon him, her desires renewed a hundred fold by the heated way he responded to her. She went wild flailing her hips, more and faster, mounting to the stratosphere of passions until she could not endure its agonizing sweetness any more and she wailed aloud, moving frantically, and taking him with her.
They toppled to the bed exhausted. She curled up close to him and she did not move.
"Oh, Paula, Paula," Bill whispered.
She reacted to this, as fatigued as she was.
"Paula!" she cried. "My name's not Paula."
Bill recovered quickly enough to realize what an unfortunate mistake he had made calling out Paula's name. It had seemed so real that she was in his arms, trying to please him, trying to excite him, doing all the wonderful things she had always done for him before Cal and his millions came along.
Bill forced himself to laugh. "See, I told you I wouldn't be able to remember your name if we took your sweater off."
Prue laughed and lay back at his side.
When Bill awoke it was bright daylight. Prue was gone. She had been a sweet little cannibal, but he did not miss her, and he knew he would not see her again. He did not want to.
He rolled over on the bed. His head pounded and he suffered the hot torment of a hangover. He checked his watch. It was mid-afternoon. There was no sense going in to the office now. This wasn't the first day he had missed since Paula left him.
He figured it wouldn't be the last.
He pressed his hand over his eyes. He needed Paula. He would be all right if he could just hear her voice, even if she raged at him for coming near.
He rolled over, lifted the receiver. He gave the desk clerk the number of Cal Oliver's home telephone.
He held the receiver against his ear listening to the ringing across the wires. He let it ring even when he knew that Paula and Cal had not yet returned. How long was their honeymoon going to last? Maybe if you had money enough you could make time stand still.
Finally the clerk came on the wire. "I don't think they are going to answer, sir."
Bill replaced the receiver in its cradle. He lay back on the bed, more empty and abandoned than ever. He couldn't tell that clerk that he had gotten some satisfaction from hearing the phone ring in her house-it was better reaching out for her than admitting that she was beyond his reach.
CHAPTER NINE
Lights burned in Cal Oliver's home. The big house sat back from a quiet residential street among other imposing edifices.
Surprised to see the lights in the house after the long time of darkness, Bill removed his foot from the accelerator and let the car roll along in the early evening darkness.
He stared toward the house. They were home. At last they'd returned from the honeymoon that had become a wild hateful thing inside Bill's mind. He had been unable to escape the sight and thought of what they were doing to each other, what delightful things Paula did for Cal, all he did to her.
Bill sweated. The things I taught her, he thought savagely, now she does for him. No matter how drunk he became he could not rim away from the tormenting mental images of Cal and Paula naked in bed, her mouth rousing him again and again from weariness, his hands fondling Paula's magnificent breasts, inflaming her to new lusts.
Bill drove past the house. The car moved under twenty miles an hour.
He gripped the steering wheel. Now that he was here and saw that Cal and Paula had returned home, he did not know what he was going to do. What could he do?
He had not looked forward, past the moment when they would come back to this town. He wanted Paula near him. But now he saw it would be no better. It was worse.
A man learned to live with the scars, but when the wounds never healed and were torn open daily, what then? How did you learn to live with that?
He was five blocks past their home on the silent, winding road among the homes of the other millionaires like Cal. He told himself to clear out and get a drink, find a woman somewhere. But there was nothing else he wanted to do right now, nowhere he wanted to go.
He saw a slow-moving car far behind him. He watched it a moment in the rear-view mirror. He pulled into a driveway, reversed and headed back the way he had come.
He drove slowly, his mind moiling over the images of Cal and Paula together. The police cruiser had sounded its warning at him a second time before he even heard them.
The cop was young, tall and unsmiling. There was a crispness to his fresh uniform that belonged up here in millionaire land. No sweaty cops on a beat out here.
The young patrolman walked from the cruiser to where Bill had pulled his car into the curb.
He flashed a light into Bill's face and then flicked it over the interior of his car.
Satisfied, he snapped it off. He said, "Hello. Could I see your driver's license please?"
Bill removed his license from his wallet and handed it over. All he could think was that he'd had three or four stiff belts before dinner. "What's the matter?" he asked.
The patrolman shrugged. "We've seen you prowling around up here the last few nights. You don't live up here. What's the idea?"
"Sorry, officer. I was just looking for someone. You see, I'm an insurance salesman." He handed the cop a card, hating the way his fingers trembled.
"Who you looking for?"
Bill searched the damp surfaces of his brain. He said, "A Mr. Oliver. He has a home up here."
"Don't you have his address?"
"Yes. But he's been away."
"That's right."
"I saw his lights were on tonight."
"That's some blocks from here."
"Well, I didn't know whether to barge in on him tonight. I mean he asked me out here to his home to visit him and all and talk about insurance. I sure want to sell him a policy, but he just got home and all, I was trying to make up my mind whether to go in there tonight, or to wait a day or two."
The patrolman returned his driver's license. "Well, Mr. Mapes, that's up to you. But you got to admit it doesn't look too good, you driving around like this night after night."
"Just didn't think about it, officer."
He sat for some moments without starting his car when the police were gone. Then he drove back past the Oliver home. A light glowed in an upstairs window. He slowed, seeing Paula's shadow on those shades up there. He felt an ache of desire for her, and a growing rage that she had walked out on him.
The next morning he was back in the neighborhood at nine. At ten he saw Cal Oliver drive out of the yard in his Caddy. Bill waited ten minutes, then he parked and walked across the deep lawn to the front door.
Paula's eyes widened with astonishment when she saw him. "What do you want?" she whispered. She was already shaking her head.
Bill gazed at her. There was no doubting that money added luster to a woman. There was a glaze about Paula that had never been there before, a look of richness that was in the negligee she wore and in the styling of her hair, the faint scent of her toilet water.
"Hard to believe you were ever my wife," Bill said, trying to smile.
She made no effort to smile. She said, "What's the matter with you, Bill, you look as if you'd slept in those clothes?"
"Doesn't everyone?" he said.
"What do you want?" she repeated. She had not invited him in, she did not do it now.
"I want to see you."
She shook her head. "You'll have to come back when Cal is here."
"What?" He burst out laughing, a helpless sound.
"I'm sorry. I can't see you like this. I won't. Cal wouldn't like it, and I don't want to hurt him."
Bill's mouth twisted. "Maybe he won't know it. I didn't know about Ed Jewel for weeks-"
"Don't start that, Bill." Her head tilted. "That's all over. Everything is over between us."
"I don't believe that."
"Well, I'm sorry. But it's true. I won't see you, Bill. Not again. I don't want to. If you want to come here, you'll have to do it when Cal is home."
He gazed at her coldly. "What I've got to say may not be for Cal's sensitive ears."
She flushed, and something flickered across her eyes. "Bill, please let me alone."
"You know I'm not going to."
"You can ruin everything like this."
"I know that. So you better remember it. I told you. I want to see you. I want to talk to you."
She shivered slightly, looking about as if trapped. "I told you. Not now."
"When?"
"I don't know."
His voice sharpened. "You've got it fine with Cal.
So fine you want to be rid of me for good. I warn you. You're not rid of me. You won't be, and I can spoil it all for you with Cal. Stop being high and mighty with me. Let me come in now, and maybe I'll stay away for a week or so."
She seemed to consider this a moment and then at last she shook her head. "Not now. No, you can't. Cal would hear about it. He would know. You may as well go to him with your rotten stories as to come in now."
"When?" He peered at her.
She bit her lip. "I'll call you. I'll let you know."
He grinned flatly. "Be sure you do, doll. Because if you don't call, I'll call you. If that doesn't work, I'll come back out here, and I'll keep coming back. And we don't want that, do we?"
"No," Paula said emptily, "we don't want that."
There was a charged anticipation in Cal when he returned home that afternoon. This was the first day since he'd married Paula that he'd been away from her for more than a few moments at a time.
He was tired as he opened the front door and crossed the foyer expectantly, but his weariness was like a cloak he would discard when he saw her. The thought of her breasts and her legs and her hungry-body whetted his own appetites, and his heart battered erratically. He did not mind. He still could not imagine a better way to die.
Paula was curled on a white couch in the living room. Her head was on the arm rest, and she stared at the ceiling. She didn't move even when he spoke her name.
Cal paused before her, frowning. He saw that she had been crying.
He sank to the divan, gripped her arms. "Paula, what's the matter?"
She tilted her head. She bit her lip, gazing into his eyes as if looking for something she was afraid she would not find there. Then she kissed him, thrusting her arms around him and clinging to him.
"Paula! What's the matter?" His quickly roused panic made his heart pound wildly. He was a little dizzy.
She clung to him for some moments and then she lay back on the arm rest, staring up at him, her face gray. "Bill was here," she said.
"What did he want? What did he do?" He knew he had to keep himself under control. Anger was playing havoc with him. The way his heart pounded was painful.
"I don't know what he wanted. He didn't do anything. I wouldn't let him in the house. I told him he would have to come back when you were at home."
Cal relaxed slightly. "That's fine, then. What's worrying you?"
She shivered. "Bill. You should have seen him. He hadn't shaved. I never saw him look quite like that before. So debased, so disheveled. He looked as if he had been drinking for a long time."
Cal nodded. "The poor devil."
"You're sorry for him?"
"Yes. I am. He's lost you. It'll take him some time to get over it. I know. Yes, I feel sorry for him."' She drew a deep breath. "Maybe you wouldn't, if you knew the truth about him."
He watched her closely. "What truth, Paula?" Paula stirred restlessly. She would not meet his gaze.
"What truth, Paula?"
"I don't know. I don't want to talk about it. I'm just afraid of him, that's all."
"Why should you be afraid of him?"
"I told you. I don't know. I just am. The way he's drinking. I doubt if he even goes to work, and he looks-well, violent. As if he might do any thing."
"Maybe you've just never seen a heartbroken man. Maybe that's all that's wrong with Bill."
"No! He told me that if I didn't see him-and he means I've got to let him do what he wants-"
"You can't do that, Paula!" Cal's hands shook with the sudden violent reaction in him.
"I know that. I won't. I told him I wouldn't. But that's why I don't want you to feel sorry for him. You don't know what he's like." She paused for some moments. "I wouldn't have met you, Cal, except he made me do it-he wanted you to fall for me so you'd buy that insurance policy."
He was silent, perched on the edge of the divan beside her. She wore a diaphanous gown, and the ridges and planes of her body winked invitingly through the fabric, but he didn't touch her. He felt drained, tired. He was shocked, but he admitted he was not truly surprised.
Paula gasped, staring at him, astonished, and a little frightened at what she saw in his face. She whispered it, "You-knew?"
"Let's say I suspected," he answered. "No. I wasn't sure. Until now."
She caught his arms, in panic. "And now you think that's all there is to what's between us-?"
"No. I don't think that. I know better. I know what we have is good-even if it did come from evil."
"Then what's the matter, Cal? Why are you looking like that-so dead, calm, yet withdrawn?"
He sighed. "A question I have to ask. Had you-ever done what you did with me-with other men?"
Paula didn't hesitate. She knew better. Nothing Bill could say would harm her as much with Cal as her own hesitation right now. She had thought all day that she would tell Cal the truth, all of it, and this would rip away all Bill's threats against her. But she saw that she could not. Not yet. She lied, quickly and sharply. "No. Of course not. Wasn't it bad enough that he made me do it-with you?"
She watched him, terrified, to see if he trusted her. She saw in the way he relaxed that he did buy it. He was relieved.
"After all," she said softly, "it was a half-million dollar policy, and Bill was after me all the time. He was like an animal about it. He wouldn't let up. That's why he's gone wild now that I fell in love with you."
Cal nodded. "The poor devil. Dug a pit and fell into it himself."
Her voice lashed out. "Don't feel sorry lor him.
He wants to destroy us!"
He smiled. "It won't be that easy."
"Still, I'm afraid."
"Don't be."
The doorbell rang. A shudder wracked through Paula and she grasped Cal's arms, clinging to him.
He laughed. "It's only the doorbell, darling. You can't be afraid every time the doorbell rings."
"But I will," she whispered, "until we get rid of Bill-until we can make him leave us alone."
He kissed her, touched gently at her breasts before he got up and crossed the room. When he returned to the living room, Dr. Kimble was with him.
Paula watched the doctor, more troubled than ever.
Dr. Kimble said, "Relax, Mrs. Oliver. Cal came by my office to see me today and I promised to drop by with results of my tests tonight. Don't look so glum. Actually, considering everything, I have pretty good news for you."
Both Paula and Cal watched Dr. Kimble intently, waiting for his verdict.
"There is no change in your coronary condition, Cal," the doctor said. He smiled. "And after a honeymoon spent with a girl as lovely as Paula, that's most encouraging, it seems to me."
Cal sighed heavily, nodding.
"Well, that's about it. I've prepared a very rigid diet for you. It has good foods on it, in correct amounts, and I hope you won't substitute other foods for them at all. With the pills I've prescribed, with rest, diet and not too much tension, you could well outlive us all."
Paula awoke abruptly the next morning at ten o'clock, troubled. The sunlight was brilliant through the tall bedroom windows, but she was chilled, wanting to scream because something was wrong. She heard a sound and her eyes opened wide.
Bill was standing over her.
He looked unshaven, sour, his clothing mussed. He grinned at her coldly.
He pressed his hand lightly over her mouth.
"You look good," he said. "Is there room in there for both of us."
Paula jerked his hand away. "Get out of here!"
Bill shrugged. "Sure. When I get what I want."
"How did you get in here?"
"I'm a clever boy, Paula-"
"The servants will tell Cal-"
"You're so afraid of Cal."
"I told you. He's jealous. He hates you."
"So. All the sooner he'll kick off-and leave all that lovely loot to us."
She glared at him. "Get out of here."
He sat down and covered her breasts with his hands. "You're repeating yourself."
"Get your hands off me. How did you get in here?"
"I told you I was clever. You remember that, doll. I'm too clever for you. I rang a side-door bell, and when the cook came from the kitchen to answer it, I came in through the back door that was left unlocked."
"You're going to ruin everything-"
"I don't have to ruin anything. I just want to love you. I want you. What's so upsetting about that? Oliver had you when you were my wife. Why shouldn't we exchange favors?"
"HI call the police!"
"Cal would definitely have to know then, wouldn't he?"
"He'd know I was frightened of you, and tried to get rid of you. And that's what matters!"
Bill ripped her gown down the front so her breasts burst free into his view. He said savagely, "Got it all figured out, haven't you?"
"Yes, I have," she said defiantly. "I married Cal-and you're not going to ruin it for me."
"Dealt me out all around, have you, Paula?" His hands explored her body, but he was tense, raging.
"Yes," she said. "I have. It's all over between us. It ended when I divorced you. You have no claims on me."
"Except one. You were to get this guy's loot-and come back to me."
She laughed at him, a sharp harsh sound that was vulgar and contemptuous. "You can forget that, too!"
His eyes widened. He said, "You'll still do what I tell you!"
"No. You can't make me do anything. I'm not your wife. Not any more."
CHAPTER TEN
Paula's raging laughter hounded Bill out the front door of her new home, into his ear, and into the nearest bar.
His hand shook as he sought a ten-dollar bill in his wallet. He laid the money on the bar, smoothing it with his quivering fingers.
"Just keep bringing me refills until the money is gone or I am," Bill ordered. "And no conversation."
The bartender grinned. "I got nothing to say to you, pal. Except one thing."
"Yeah?" Bill glared across the bar, his eyes murderous.
"You need a shave." The bartender grinned and filled Bill's glass.
The drinking didn't work, and Bill had been afraid that it would not. He had been drinking since Paula walked out on him. Now he needed something new and different because Paula was no longer anyone he knew, or had ever known.
He kept drinking because for the moment he didn't know what else to do.
He knew only that he needed violence, nothing else would ever purge the rage that had grown inside him. He drank up the ten dollars, found a new place, cashed a check because they knew him. He ended up alone in a cheap hotel, and woke up the next morning hating Paula and needing a drink.
He found a bar that opened at nine that morning. He stood with a couple of other disreputable characters when the saloonkeep opened his doors. They hurried in past him, shaking with lust for liquor.
Bill told himself he was different from the two winos. They were caught, but he wasn't. Liquor controlled them, but he was still boss; he could handle it.
Sure, he was on a binge, but he could stop when he wanted to. Right now he didn't want to. He needed the clarity of an alcoholic mind because he had to figure what to do about Paula. She had wrecked his life, and he couldn't let her get away with that. Could he?
He sat hunched over his drink. Something reminded him of insurance and he gave a brief, wry thought to his office and his debit. He hadn't gone near either for days now. He could not worry about that. His future was at stake, and it needed a lot of drinking, a lot of thinking.
By three o'clock that afternoon he did not know the name or address of the bar in which he was drinking. He had no idea how he came into the place, or how many others he had visited since nine that morning.
A reluctant view into the bar mirror showed him his coat was torn and that there was a gash along his cheek. He did not remember fighting. He must have fought. He shook his head, and drank quickly.
"Bill."
He straightened and swung his head around. He focused his gaze with some difficulty and found Tom Michelson standing there.
"Tom!" he said. "How're things, ole Tom! Have a drink."
"Not now, thanks," Tom said without smiling. "I've been looking for you, Bill."
"Knew just where to flush me out, huh, Tom?"
Tom spoke acidly. "We've a pretty good idea where we can find you lately, Bill."
"Just had a few drinks," Bill protested.
"You've been on a drunk since your wife left you. You better face up to it, Bill, you're in a mess. You've gotten yourself in a mess where nothing but whiskey means anything to you. Your job. The fact that you were our top salesman. Your future. Nothing but whiskey."
"Oh, come on, Tom!" Bill said in exaggerated warmth. "Where's your old sense of humor?"
"That's about gone, too, Bill."
Bill scowled, wavering slightly on the stool. He said coldly. "You're trying to tell me something, Tom, ole Tom."
"I'm trying to tell you to pull yourself together, before you can't ... Maybe it's already too late. I hope not."
"Oh, for hell's sake. I drink a little. But I can leave it alone if I want to. I could stop like that." He tried to snap his fingers.
"I've heard that before, Bill. A lot of times before. From better men than you."
Bill stiffened. "Ain't no better men than me. You got any better salesmen than me? I brought 'em in, didn't I? You think that Cal Oliver is better than me because he took my wife away from me-?"
"We don't have to talk about it, Bill."
Bill shrugged and grinned at him. "Okay, Boss. You name it. What'll we talk about?"
"You. I came here to talk about you."
"I'm unworthy. But if you insist. What about me? You like the color of my eyes, Tommy?"
"I don't like anything about you. You're a wreck. And you did it all yourself."
Bill shivered with the inner rages that racked him. "And I did it to myself," he said. "Don't forget that. Not to you. Or anybody else. Didn't hurt nobody but me. Nobody. What I did, I did to me. Constitutional right."
"I'm afraid we can't stand by and watch it, Bill. Even if it remains personal. It's too bad, but we've got the image of the company to think about-"
"You're firing me?"
"I'm sorry. We've got our image, Bill, and-"
"You know what you can do with your image, Tom, ole Tom!"
When Tom Michelson was finally and forever gone, out of the bar, and out of his life, Bill sagged against the thick wood, pressing his head against its coolness.
"You all right?" the bartender said.
Bill straightened his face bloodless. "I'm lovely. Just need one more drink."
"Sorry, Mr. Mapes. Not in here."
And so he was on the street again, in more ways than one. He had lost his wife, his job, and now they invited him out of a cheap, lousy bar.
The impact of the terrible losses he had sustained struck him hard. He barely made it to an alley.
He emerged, gray-faced and shaken. His stomach quivered, and he needed a drink. But suddenly he made up his mind to stop drinking. He would show them. Tom. Cal. Paula. The whole blanking world. They thought he was finished. That proved they didn't even know him. None of them knew him.
He let himself into the silent house where he had lived with Paula. He made a pot of instant coffee and drank all of it, black. He lost most of it in the sink. He undressed, wavering through the house to the bathroom.
He got in under the shower and turned on the hot and cold full force. The water punished him. He sagged against the dies, taking it like whips stinging his naked skin.
He was weaker than he ever remembered having been when he finally emerged from the bathroom. He dressed slowly, thinking that one drink would quiet the butterflies in his belly. There was whiskey in the kitchen. One drink. But he did not take it.
Dressed, he wandered through the house. What was he to do with himself until he got some strength back? He should eat, but the thought of food gagged him. Still, if he stayed in this condition, and alone, he would be hitting a bottle soon. He was only human. The thought of a drink seemed tastier and tastier, in fact.
No. He had to get out of here. Something to take his mind off booze, and off Paula for the moment.
He walked into the bar where he had met Prue. Fighting down her urges would tire him so he could sleep, even if he felt no strong desire for her. He admitted he felt no strong desire for any woman since Paula shafted him.
Paula. He had to stop thinking about her.
The memory of her raging laughter rattled through his mind like noise in an attic.
He walked past the bar and went to one of the dark booths. He would order milk and make a date with Prue. Milk and Prue. How healthy it all sounded!
The waitress was pretty, but he had never seen her before. "Where's Prue?" he asked.
The waitress smiled knowingly. "She took off early this evening, if you know what I mean."
He winced slightly, knowing what she meant. That Prue. She was the all-American sex symbol, for sure. She didn't need a man, she needed a battalion.
He ordered a drink, afraid he could not take the laughter that his ordering milk would elicit from the waitress. Her breasts were like oranges. Her name was Phyllis, and the lettering wandered half across her chest.
He saw Constance sitting at the bar. She let her gaze rake across him as if he were not there, as though she had never seen him before.
He got out of the booth, crossed to the bar where Constance was perched on a stool.
"Hello, Connie," he said.
"Get lost."
"I've been looking for you."
"Go find Prue-you like young girls."
"I like girls who know their way around."
"Well, I don't like you."
"Couldn't you have a drink with me?"
"I'm particular who I drink with." He grinned. "All right. You've hacked me. You've put me down. Can we be friends?"
"No."
"You do carry a grudge, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Why, Connie? So I made a mistake. So I had promised to take Prue out. Does that mean the end of the world?"
"For us it does, mister."
"Call me Bill."
"You won't be around long enough to call you anything."
"I'd like to take you to dinner, Connie. Then we could go out dancing-I admit I want to end up in a motel. But that would be up to you."
"I can tell you now. Get lost."
He flinched. Constance had stirred all the old bitter rages that had poisoned him. His voice hardened. "All right. You won't do it for friendship. How much?"
She twisted on the bar, her face taut. "Do you think I'm a tramp?"
He tried to smile. "What do you care what I think as long as you get paid?"
"I can have you thrown out of here."
"Sure you can. Or you can be smart-and name your own price."
Constance hesitated. She glanced past him to see if they were overheard. The music wailed loudly, but the bartender was eying them apprehensively. Her mouth twisted as she thought it over.
"My own price?" she said.
"That's right."
"One hundred dollars."
He saw she thought he'd back down because the price was too high-and she was right, considering the merchandise. But he managed to conceal his thoughts behind an unwavering smile.
"Will you take a check?"
She gazed at him. "Is it any good?"
He shrugged. "I'll give you the check. Maybe after spending the night with me, you won't care whether the check bounces or not."
Constance glanced at him. She laughed faintly and nodded. "Write it out."
He opened his checkbook and wrote on the bar. He blew on it, handed the paper to her.
She folded it carefully, taking her time, and placing it in her handbag.
"All right, Bill," she said. "Let's go."
In the hotel room, she poured drinks for them, but Bill refused one.
"I thought you liked to drink," she said.
"I do," he said. "But I don't ordinarily pay one hundred dollars for one night with a doll. I want to enjoy every minute of it."
"All senses clear."
"Something like that." But he frowned, wondering what he would do with her. She was prettier than he had thought the first time he saw her-somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-but used merchandise.
"I'll be worth it," she promised.
"They all say that. I've decided that they all think they are. Each dame thinks she's just a little better, a little different from the next one."
"You'll see," Constance said with a little smile. "As soon as I have one more drink."
Bill kicked off his shoes, tossed his coat across a chair. He loosened his de, unbuttoned his shirt collar and lay down across the bed on his back.
He watched her drinking from the mouth of the bottle, her back trim, her hips wide, but supple, her legs shapely if not as long as-as he liked them-he started to think if not as long as Paula's.
He decided to tell her the truth. Why not? It was different from with Prue-Connie was getting paid, wasn't she? She may as well know the odds against her.
"I don't know how good I'll be," he said. "Maybe I won't be any good at all. I'm all snarled up. I might as well tell you that. I hate a dame. I hate her so bad that maybe I hate all women with her."
"I figured some woman had put the hooks to you," Connie said, drinking again. She replaced the bottle on the table and turned, already removing her dress. "Why don't you relax, and let me worry about that?"
"I'm relaxed," he told her. "But that may be the trouble."
"I'm not a virgin," she said. "I know my way around-and I know my way around men. All kinds of men. You'll see."
She let her skirt fall away, and unmoving, Bill lay on the bed and watched her. She loosened her stockings. She took her time rolling them along her legs, pushed them into her slippers.
"How do you like it so far?"
"Keep going," was all he said.
She loosened her bra next and her breasts burst into view, milk white, not large, but jutting, with rigid nipples as if she were cold. But she was not. She let him look at her for a while, and then she slid her panties down and wavered before him in the nude.
She sat down beside him on the bed and undressed him then, teasing him with her breasts carried lingeringly across his face, held just above his lips.
When he was undressed, she kissed him at the base of his throat, her long-nailed fingers working at him like a scratching kitten. Her mouth moved down on his chest, down along his stomach, iSown.
He reached for her to pull her back up into his arms and then changed his mind. He accepted the sweetness of her mouth. He closed his hands in her hair, feeling the lust and the rage merging inside him until it became one furious need for release. He hated Connie. He hated Paula. He hated all women. He needed to degrade and debase them. He needed to hurt them. He wanted to destroy any of them who came near him.
"Oh, Bill, don't! You're hurting me!"
"Rough, isn't it?" he taunted her. "You know your way around men, baby, do you know your way round men like me?"
She gasped, lunging away from him. She stared at him, her mouth swollen, face flushed. "There are no men like you!" she cried. "You don't want to love me,' you want to hurt me."
"That's the way the check bounces, baby."
She tried to crawl away from him. He caught her by the hair and dragged her back to him. "You named the price, baby. Now you earn your money!"
"Let me go!"
"Sure. When you've quieted all the tigers in me, when you've soothed the savage beast, when you've made me too tired to hate anybody-even you-then I'll let you go!"
She stared at him, her eyes wide. "I'll scream! I swear it. I'll bring this hotel down on you!"
He laughed at her. "I thought you were a real woman-"
"I am. But maybe I don't like the things you like-"
"Come on," he dared her, pulling her heated, nude body back across him. "I'll make you like it. If you're so smart, you ought to know that the easiest way to control a man is to quiet him down-come on, baby-quiet me!"
He thrust her down on the mattress under him. She cried out when he came down upon her. But after a moment her arms clasped him with a furious violence and she could not wait for him. Excitement and fear mixed and erupted in her.
"What are you?" she cried, rolling her blonde head back and forth when he went on loving her with mounting fury. "What are you?"
"I told you," he panted. "I'm a man full of hatred. A man with fury in him. Come on. You're going to quiet all those furies, aren't you, Connie?"
She sagged under him, her arms clinging to him. "I never met a man like you," she gasped. "It may kill me-but I-I can't think of a better way to die."
Dawn lightened the room even brighter than the hotel lamp when Bill finally released her and let her fall away from him on the mattress. Connie whimpered and curled up, instantly asleep.
He could not even recount in his mind all that he had forced her to do for him through the eternal night, but he was still driven by fury. Connie was asleep, exhausted, but the rages had not released him.
They had only become wound tighter and tighter.
He got up from the bed and found his clothing. He dressed, feeling weak-bellied, and watery in the legs, but there was a cold inner strength burning in him, a savage determination that he did not even understand.
At the door he hesitated a moment, looking back at Connie's nude body sprawled on the bed, the dimples in her bottom.
He shivered because he felt as if he had reached a crisis in his life. He could see the way his life must become, a string of strange women left sprawled in strange beds, clutching money he had paid them-because from now on he would always have to pay them, one way or another.
He closed the door quickly behind him.
There was a sun brilliant, empty-stomached brightness about the morning early like this. The streets were almost empty. He could look back to the time when a day looked fresh, unspoiled, new, viewed at this hour. He no longer saw it that way.
He saw a taxi parked outside the hotel, the driver dozing in it. Even when he got inside the car and gave the cabbie Cal's address, he still told himself he did not know where he was going.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bill got out of the cab at the entrance of Cal's drive. There was a chill about him, a kind of terminal cold. He walked slowly in the sun. He was not sweating and he did not hurry.
The house looked silent at this hour before even the servants were awake. As he went up the front steps Bill reached into his pocket and took out the key which he had stolen when he saw Paula here yesterday.
My wife's here, he thought in chilled logic, in a way that wakes this my house too, doesn't it?
He grinned faintly, pleased with this idea. Cal would have to share Paula with him whether he liked it or not. Or Cal would have to give her back to him.
He nodded, inserting the key into the lock and turning it silently. This was the way it was. Paula was his wife; she belonged to him and he wanted her back-He had come here to get her.
Bill let himself into the gray foyer and closed the door behind him. There was intensified silence in here. He looked about, feeling the stirring of panic. Perhaps they had gone away again. People could do that when they were rich. They could come and go as they liked. Maybe they were running away from him.
Sweat popped out across his forehead now, small icy beads. He ran to the stair and sliding his hand along the balustrade went hurriedly up the steps.
He paused at the head of the stairs. A new kind of silence greeted him here. He hesitated, trying to pin it down. There were little noises, not quite loud enough to be discerned, like mice skittering in an attic.
There was someone up here, all right. Some of the panic dissolved, the sweat dried away and he moved more purposefully.
He knew where Paula's room was, and he went directly to it.
He didn't hurry, and as he walked he remembered the last time he had seen her, the way she had raged with laughter at him and told him she was free of him. Well, she would never be free of him. He would not let her go. He thought of the years they had had together, all she had done for him, the way he had known her body. Things like that were not easily thrown aside, any more than he was easily thrown aside. She had laughed at him, but she would see she could not do that, either.
Bill stood outside Paula's bedroom door. He listened at it a few moments, and the small whispery sounds were louder and they came from inside her room.
He slowly turned the knob. The door was unlocked as he had known it would be and he eased himself inside.
The heavy drapes were drawn at the windows. There was no sense of daylight in the room, but his eyes became quickly adjusted to the gloom.
He heard those noises now more loudly. There was violence in them, and they came from her bed.
His heart slugging, Bill took a step forward. When he saw what they were doing it stopped him cold.
He had known they were married, but he had not expected to find them like this at this hour of the morning.
He could see well now, too well. He saw Cal's bared back. Cal wore pajama bottoms, but Paula wore nothing and they were going at each other like puppies in a pen.
He stared at them. He had moved cautiously, been quiet, but he need not. They would not have heard him just now no matter how much noise he made.
He shook his head. It was as it had been that day he found Paula and Ed Jewel locked in passionate embrace in his own bed. For a second it was all confused in his mind, time went out of balance, and it could have been Ed on that bed battering at Paula.
It wasn't. It was Cal, all right, and he was lost in his attempt to destroy her. Their whispered words, a mindless mixture of endearments and obscenities, matched the savagery of their breathing, the bouncing of the inner springs.
He stared, unable to move. He remembered that day when he had found Ed with his wife; he had gotten a perverted kind of pleasure from it, the agony shocked everything else from his mind. He felt rage later, but at that moment of discovery, he could only watch them in their ecstasy.
Now he did not want to watch. Maybe it was ironic, maybe insane, he didn't know; he didn't care. He had let another man use her when she was his wife, but now he wanted to kill Cal for having her when she was no longer his wife.
He took involuntary steps forward. He stood over them beside the bed, aching in the pit of his stomach. Paula's head was back, her hair sweated into a frame of curls and waves about her pale face. Her eyes were closed and she breathed through her mouth, talking against Cal's cheeks, saying the mindless words that his fury drove out of her.
Cal pinioned her to the mattress, and she locked him down upon her with her ankles clenched taut, calf-muscles rigid, toes pointed toward heaven. Cal caressed her breasts roughly, dghtening Ins hands upon their lush fullness as if afraid of losing her. The bed throbbed beneath them.
"Stop it!"
Bill shuddered at the raging sound of his own voice. He had not even known that he was going to yell. The words gushed out of him.
He stood and watched their pulsating bodies, passion building in them, even when they heard the shouting from above them. It was like something they could not believe.
He saw the quiver wrack Cal's slender body. For some seconds Cal went on heaving himself upon Paula. If Bill had hated Cal before, what he felt toward him now was murderous rage.
Still loving each other, Paula and Cal became belatedly conscious of his presence over them, of his raging at them.
As if in some kind of exaggerated slow motion, Cal turned his head upward from the heated expanses of Paula's bared breasts, gazing dazedly at Bill across his shoulder.
"Stop it!"
Bill was shivering all over. When Cal did not move swiftly enough for him, he lunged forward, grabbing the smaller man in an arm-lock around his neck.
Bill wrenched back hard enough to rip Cal's head from his shoulders. His arm tightened on Cal's Adam's apple as he pulled him violently from Paula's clinging embrace.
Finally Paula returned from wherever it was that Cal's lovemaking had transported her. She opened her eyes. It took the space of seconds for them to focus on Bill's face, for her truly to see him standing like an avenging angel, choking the life out of Cal.
Paula recognized Bill and screamed.
Bill leaped backward, carrying Cal with him. He broke Cal loose from the lock of Paula's upraised legs, he carried him across the foot of the bed and hurled him outward to the floor. He released Cal then, letting him sprawl outward on his back.
Paula went on screaming.
"Shut up!" Bill raged at her. His voice was hoarse and shaking. He saw her only through a red occluding fog of fury. "Shut up or I'll kill you!"
She didn't even appear to hear him. Hysterical screams gushed across her mouth.
Paula lay still on the bed. Bill leaped at her and clapped his hand over her mouth.
"Keep still!"
Paula sank her teeth into Bill's palm. She bit fiercely, like a vixen. Pain burned up through his arm and exploded in his brain. Her mouth clamped on the soft flesh of his hand, her teeth sinking deeper and deeper.
Bill growled out in pain and madness.
Instinctively Bill thrust out his other hand, striking Paula in the forehead with the heel of his hand. He knocked her away from his bleeding palm. She seemed unaware of the impact of his blow.
She lunged upward from the bed, her teeth bared, her naked body sweated and trembling. She struck against Bill, carrying him backwards. Her nails raked his cheeks, drawing blood.
When he retreated, she did not stop. She came up to her knees on the mattress and then to her feet, still crying and screaming hysterically.
She hurtled herself from the bed toward him, her hands like talons clawing for his eyes.
Bill tried to catch her, but she kicked out with her knee, catching him in the groin. The room skidded crazily. He gasped for breath, doubling up.
She beat at him and clawed at him as he hunched there trying to breathe.
"I hate you!" she screamed. "You're insane and I hate you!"
Still doubled up, Bill backed away, trying to escape her long enough to overcome the blinding effects of her savage kick to his crotch.
He backed against the wall and straightened slightly, seeing her through a vague blur of wheeling pin-wheels of light.
Paula paused a few feet from him. Her wild eyes struck against him, moved to Cal sprawled unmoving on the floor.
Moaning in hysteria, Paula shook her head.
Then her eyes flickered to the dresser. She turned and ran to it. She pulled open the drawer and took out a small revolver.
She wheeled around as Bill straightened.
She looked like some beautiful creature inexplicably lost in a nightmare. Her hair was loose about her face, dripping to her bared shoulders. Her naked breasts heaved with the passionate fury of her breathing. Her body was like a sculpture, of a roused woman, the bands of muscles in her tense legs, the sweat gleaming on the nude planes of her thighs, her stomach, her wildly stretched mouth.
She brought the gun up.
Cal whispered from the floor. "No, Paula. Oh, Paula, no. Don't do it."
"I've got to kill him!" Her voice was empty, like a poor recording;. "He broke in here! I've got to kill him!"
Bill didn't speak. He stood braced against the wall, watching her. The wildness had subsided and he was fatalistically cold now. The gun did not frighten him. He saw that Paula might use it, nothing could stop her in her madness, and it did not matter. She had killed him a long time ago-that morning he found her in bed with Ed. It didn't matter what she did to him now.
Cal managed to pull himself up from the floor, by catching at a chair and painfully slowly hoisting his body upward. He braced himself on the chair for some moments, putting his naked form between Bill and the gun in Paula's trembling hand.
"Don't do it, Paula," Cal said. It was an effort for him to speak, as if he were unable to breathe freely.
He seemed to have forgotten Bill. He didn't bother to glance toward him. He kept his gaze fixed on Paula.
When Bill brought his own gaze from the gun in Paula's hand to Cal, he saw that the back of Cal's head was bleeding profusely. Blood gushed from the wound, spilled down his neck and along his back, coagulating between his shoulder blades.
Bill shuddered, seeing where Cal had struck his head when he had thrown him off Paula s body and off the bed.
Cal didn't pay any attention to the blood, either. He lifted his hand, touched at the bleeding wound, but stared at Paula.
"Get out of the way, Cal," Paula said. She was so intent upon the gun in her hand and her target she didn't see the blood on Cal's fingers yet.
"No, Paula. You mustn't do it. If you-killed him-it would kill us, too!" Cal gasped as if it took his last effort to speak those words.
Paula shook her head, her voice wailing out.
"He broke in here!" she cried. "Nobody would blame me! Nobody would blame us!"
Cal gasped for breath. "We would blame ourselves, Paula. We've done enough to him-we can't buy any kind of life for ourselves by doing any more to him."
Paula shook her head. "He's not going to let us alone, Cal! He wants to destroy us."
"You ran out on me!" Bill yelled at her. "A guy comes along with a million dollars and a bum heart, and you're through with me."
"I love you, Cal!" Paula tried to drown the accusation in Bill's voice.
"You think you were the only one?" Bill shouted at Cal.
Cal looked oddly from Paula to Bill. He shook his head. The blood streamed along the nape of his neck.
Bill persisted. "She did it with all of them, just as she did with you. She's after your money when you kick off, that's all she wants from you ... She got a divorce from me so she could many you-and come back to me with your money!"
Paula said, "Oh, Cal, please-"
"You're a little mixed up, Bill," Cal said. His voice was weak and he took deep breaths between every few words. "Maybe Paula married me for my money ... Fair enough ... She's been worth it ... But you can't get it-ever."
Bill trembled visibly. He stared at Paula, not knowing yet what she had done, but knowing that she had defeated him. And he saw something else in his mind suddenly burned free of everything by his rage: he had not came here as much in jealousy as greed. He had not come for Paula-not for Paula alone-but for Paula and those millions she would inherit.
The fear of this loss had knocked him out of his tree.
And somehow Paula had cheated him.
He shook his head. He whispered. "No."
"Paula insisted I make a new will, Mapes. In the event that Paula should ever remarry you-after my death-all my money goes to my mother, and to charity."
"No!" Bill cried out. He lunged toward Paula. His teeth were bared and his eyes distended.
Cal stepped between them. Bill swung out with the back of his hand. It seemed to him that he barely came in contact with the side of Cal's head.
It was as if Cal were made of cotton candy, and he floated out away from Bill's swinging arm.
Bill stopped cold.
He heard Paula's insensate screaming, but he did not look at her. He could not pull his gaze away from Cal.
The slender man seemed to crumple like old waste, sinking to the floor. He didn't move.
Bill never knew how long he stood there, staring at Cal and waiting for him to get up. But Cal stayed crumpled on the floor, his head in a pool of blood.
After a long time Bill lifted his head.
Paula was staring up at him. There was horror in her face, but there was something else in it, too, something that Bill could not understand.
Seeing her face like that, he shivered and retreated half a step.
"You killed him," Paula said.
"No." The word spilled from Bill's quavering lips. "I swung at him. He fell. I never touched him."
"You hit him," she said. "You knocked him down. You killed him."
Bill shook his head, staring at her. It was like looking into the upsetting face of a stranger-a stranger full of hatred.
"Accidental," Bill whispered. "It was an accident."
"You killed him," Paula said.
Bill heard sounds. He looked around, seeing the servants in varying stages of undress. They stared at Paula's nudity, at Cal's body sprawled in death on the floor, at Bill.
He shifted his gaze from each of their faces, growing colder. He shook his head again. He no longer understood clearly just why he had come to this house this morning, but it was not for this.
"Oh, my poor darling," Paula sobbed. She sank to her knees on the floor beside Cal's body. She lifted his bloodied head and cradled it against her naked breasts.
Her hair fell about her face.
Bill shook his head, staring down at her. He turned and bolted toward the door. The servants closed ranks trying to stop him, but when they saw his face they stepped aside and he ran out of the house.
The police located him easily. When they found him he was walking along a side street checking the building numbers.
They asked him what he was looking for, but he could not tell them.
They asked him what his name was, but he could not tell them that, either.
"You better come along with us, mister," one of the patrolmen said. They helped him into the rear seat of the cruiser. He stumbled and they caught his arm, supporting him.
He sat silently, staring at the floor on the ride up to Cal's house.
The bedroom was overrun with people, servants, photographers, police personnel. Someone had draped a bathrobe about Paula. She seemed hardly aware of where she was.
Paula straightened slightly and her face went gray and granite hard when they herded Bill into the room.
He looked at her a moment. His gaze fell away to Cal's body inside a chalked area on the floor.
"Is this the man who broke into the house?" a detective asked the servants.
"He was in this room when we came up here," a servant said.
"Why did you come up?"
"We heard Mrs. Oliver screaming. And we heard this man yelling," the stout cook said.
"Yelling? What was he yelling?"
"He kept yelling, 'I'll kill you! I'll kill you!' We heard him all over the house."
The other servants nodded, corroborating the cook's testimony.
The detective looked at Bill. "I warn you, Mapes, anything you say will be used against you."
"Accident," Bill whispered. "It was an accident."
"He killed him," Paula said in a dead, flat voice. "He hit him. He kept hitting him-"
"Oh, no," Bill said.
"He kept hitting him," Paula persisted. "He kept hitting him and he killed him. He broke in this house and he killed my husband." , The detective glanced at Bill. "What you got to say about that, Mapes?"
Bill shook his head. "My wife. She's my wife."
"Did you break in here and kill Cal Oliver, Mapes?"
"My wife," Bill said.
"Did you kill him?" the detective's voice hardened. "Did you hit him and kill him?"
"Accident," Bill whispered. "It was an accident."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tom Michelson sat at the bar in the dimly lighted cocktail lounge and spread the newspaper out before him. It was too dark in here to read the text, but the headlines and the pictures of Cal Oliver, Paula and Bill Mapes stood out as if etched in fire.
He stared at the three pictures. The trial had ended, and Bill Mapes had been sentenced.
But it's not over, Tom thought, maybe it never will end. Nobody remembers Bill, or cares about him, but they won't forget the way he sold insurance-or the fact that he was my top salesman. What a bad name it gives insurance. It'll be a long time before they stop making jokes about it.
He winced. It had him drinking in the middle of the afternoon. Something he had never done before.
In fact, he had censured Bill Mapes for drinking in the afternoon. He had fired him for it. And now here he was, doing the same thing.
He thought that he ought to get out of here, get back to the office. But instead, he called the bartender and ordered another drink.
On a stool near him a blonde, faintly familiar, but with a brassy hard look about her, was glancing his way. Then he saw that she was reading those headlines.
He looked her over, the rising breasts struggling against the fabric of her sheer blouse. The whiskey or something had stirred something in him. He wondered if he should speak to her.
She said, "Too bad about him, wasn't it?"
Tom said, startled, "Who?"
"That fellow. Mapes. The insurance man."
"Yes. Yes." Tom felt his face burn when she called Bill the insurance man. That was what they remembered, all right.
On his other side, a pert-breasted cocktail waitress pressed herself against Tom's arm, studying the newspaper. He read her name over her left boobie, Prue.
Prue said, "It was a dirty shame. Sending him to prison. Five to ten years-"
"He killed a man!" the blonde said without pity.
"How do you know?" Prue said, stroking Tom's arm almost unconsciously with her resilient breast. "He could have died of a heart attack. He had a bad heart. Besides, I knew Bill Mapes-"
"Did you?" Tom said.
"Sure. He used to come in here. You remember him, Connie?" She spoke around Tom to the blonde.
Constance nodded. "I remember him, all right, and I say he could have lulled Cal Oliver. There was this violence about him. Sometimes he acted like he wanted to hurt you-"
"He wasn't like that at all!" Prue said, shocked. "He was sweet and gentle-and all broke up over the way his wife left him for a million dollars."
"I'd have left him, too, for a million bucks," Constance said.
"Sure you would," Prue agreed. "You'd have left him for five dollars."
"You know what you are," Connie said.
"Now, girls," Tom said. "Let me buy you a drink and we won't argue. I feel like drinking-anything but working-today. I mean, Bill Mapes sentenced to prison and all-"
"He didn't have a chance," Prue said, "when his ex-wife testified the way she did, and those servants saying they heard him yelling that he was going to kill Mr. Oliver. The poor guy. I don't think he did it. He said it was an accident. I believe him."
"Let me buy you two ladies a drink?" Tom suggested again.
Connie moved over one stool closer and took Tom's arm and snuggled it against her breast. He felt a shock of excitement stir through his loins.
Prue stared coldly across him at Connie. She did not move away from the other side of Tom. She said, "I'm on duty right now, and can't drink, hon-"
"That's too bad," Constance said cheerfully.
"-but let me get off duty, change my dress. I'll be back. We'll have a drink or two-then maybe we can go out somewhere, eh?"
"Sounds fine to me," Tom said.
"What about me?" Constance complained.
Tom pushed his arm boldly across the rise of her nearest breast. "Why don't you come with us, hon? The three of us ought to be able to have quite a party."
Prue laughed. "Yes. Why don't you do that, Connie? Maybe you'll find out why men prefer me?"
Constance laughed. "I'm willing. You and I can settle a lot of things, Prue."
"Sounds good to me," Tom said, "anything I can help you girls prove, just call on me."
"Don't worry, doll," Prue said. "We will."
Tom drew a deep breath and laughed. He felt as if he had entered a new surrealistic world into which he had never ventured before. He folded the newspaper over so that Bill Mapes's photo no longer stared up at him with that faint, taunting, twisted smile of his....
Paula walked up the gangplank of the Lady Elizabeth, a cruise ship headed for a lazy month in the south seas. Somewhere a band played, people shouted from the deck and from the pier. Gulls screamed at the ship fantail. Someone bumped her and apologized. She did not even glance toward them.
She wore a dark suit, a dark cloche hat, dark glasses. Her face was set, unsmiling. She was welcomed aboard and guided to her air-conditioned stateroom.
The ship moved sluggishly away from the dock. She stared at herself in the mirror. She pulled off the dark glasses, studied her reflection and then smiled in a chilled way.
It was all over. Cal's will had been probated and she was a rich widow, worth more millions than she had dreamed Cal could have accumulated in less than forty years. Poor Cal.
Still, it had been a long year since his death-his murder. She met her gaze and her mouth pulled into a wry smile. She had stuck to that. It was murder. Bill had killed him. The testimony of the servants had helped. Bill had broken into the house. It didn't matter. She was free of him.
She thought again, poor Cal, and then her lips parted in a faint anticipatory smile. It had been a year. This was her last few moments in a dark dress. The period of mourning had ended.
No one could blame her for wanting to have a little fun.
Her hands trembled slightly as she unbuttoned the jacket, loosened the zipper and stepped out of the dark skirt. She wore only as her bra and matching underpants, part of the new extensive wardrobe of brightness that filled the trunks and elegant suitcases stacked against the bed.
She stared at her body in the mirror, pleased with herself. She was still young. Her breasts stood full and brimming, but there was not the slightest suggestion of sagging.
She was lovely-and her whole life lay ahead of her.
"Oh, I beg your pardon."
Paula caught the flicker of a man's shadow behind her in the mirror and she spun around.
A man stood just inside her stateroom door. He stared at her almost nude body in rapt admiration.
He mumbled something, "wrong door. I'm just across the way, I am so sorry...." but he went on gazing at her in hungry admiration.
Then their gazes met. Paula's eyes widened in recognition. Her lips parted.
"Why, aren't you-?"
"Aren't you-?"
They spoke simultaneously, stopped, and laughed.
"Why, you're Robert Eden!" she said.
"And you're Mrs. Oliver," he said in pleasure. He looked about. "Is Mr-"
"My husband is dead," Paula said. There had been so much publicity, the murder, the trial, the sensational testimony, it was difficult to believe that young Eden hadn't read about it.
"Oh, yes, of course," he said. "I did read-but I didn't connect it with the lovely lady I met when she was on her honeymoon-last year, wasn't it?"
"That's right," Paula said. She let her gaze prowl across Robert Eden. He looked so young, strong, and virile. She recalled that when she'd met him on a cruise like this last year, something about him stirred old memories in her, and the same thing happened now, puzzling her again. She could not place what it was about him that attracted him above and beyond his good looks, his obvious charm.
"I dreamed of you," he said. "I fell in love with you-even if you were on your honeymoon. But I never expected to see you again."
Paula laughed suddenly. "Didn't you, Robert? Are you sure you never expected to see me again?"
Robert frowned, as if deeply troubled. "Why, you're teasing me, Mrs. Oliver."
"Am I?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Don't you?" She went on standing before the mirror, letting him feast his eyes on her barely concealed body. "I doubt if you find them as young as I am-or as rich-as a rule, do you?"
He stepped forward, closing the door. His face looked taut, wounded. "What do you mean?"
She watched him. "Well get along better being honest with one another, Robert."
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."
She smiled enigmatically. "Don't you, Robert? A handsome young man like you? Seeing you on one luxury cruise might be accidental. But twice in a row?"
"You're making a cruel accusation, Mrs. Oliver."
"I'm only facing the truth. I see the way you look at me, Robert. There's a hunger in your eyes. But it's more than just hunger for my money. But I may as well accept the fact that you make a career of-this-riding the cruise ships where you can meet the rich, newly-made widows."
"How can you say that? When I saw you first you were no widow. I fell hard for you then."
Paula nodded, smiling. "That's what makes it easier for me to forgive you."
"Forgive me?"
"Yes. For coming on this ship and looking for me-and pretending to be in the wrong stateroom! How corny can you get?"
He straightened, looking wounded. "Do you want me to leave?"
She licked the tip of her tongue across her lips. "Do you want to?"
"If you're going to be so cruel to me."
"I don't know whether I'll be cruel to you yet or not. It depends on how good you are."
He drew a deep breath and walked slowly toward her. "I don't think you'll be disappointed, Mrs. Oliver."
"My name is Paula."
"I don't think you'll be disappointed, Paula."
He was only a few feet from her, and she stood silently watching him coming nearer, waiting for the moment when his hands would close on her breasts, on her hips, when he would pull her to him. It had been a long, lonely year....
Her voice lowered, "I'll be very disappointed if you don't do one thing for me, Robert."
"Anything, Paula, what is it?"
"Tell me the truth. You knew I was on this ship. In this stateroom. Didn't you?"
He shrugged and laughed. He was directly before her now, looking down at her. His hands came up, greedily reaching for the wealth of her breasts. He said, "I figured you might be lonely. I thought you might be glad to see me."
Paula sagged against him. "Oh, I am," she breathed. "I'm so glad." And then suddenly she realized what attracted her about him, what had set him apart for her even a year ago. Although he was much younger, there was the violence and the virility about him that had drawn her first to Bill. That was it, that was what made her go empty when Robert touched her like this. He reminded her of Bill.