I was puzzled as to what I ought to do right now. Making like an outraged, overprotective mother would be disastrous. If Tom really was getting his first piece, there wasn't a damn thing I could do! In fact, Eadie was probably just the kind of woman a kid ought to start with--great figure, beauty-contest face, and an unspoiled appetite for sex. On the other hand, she probably had no idea how sensitive fifteen-year-old boys are; she might make some sort of comment that would leave a hell of a scar. What it boiled down to was, I couldn't do anything, but I had too much of the mother instinct to do nothing. I had to know what was happening to my baby!
But Mona Shelton's "baby" needed no help from his mother.
CHAPTER ONE
Mona Shelton, here. I'm Corky Shelton's wife, even though you couldn't have been sure the night of December twelfth. People were scrambled, if you know what I mean, and Corky had disappeared with Eadie Ferris, while Emmett Murdock had edged me into the study in his and Carol's suite.
It was that kind of setting. We were the Murdocks' guests, supposedly there to accept or reject an assignment they wanted us to take, and they'd split the costs with Dr. Jerry Simone and his wife Brenda for the whole top floor of the Van Orton Seaview. We had our fifteen-year-old, Tom, quarantined for the night in his room and were participating in what the Murdocks and Simones called a reunion.
Frankly, that meant a night of no-holds-barred swapping, renewing something we'd fallen into on a previous job we'd done for them. I mean, that's the kind of thing you get into sometimes in our business. Makes it worthwhile when you get to mix fun with business. We'd been there since noon and still had no idea what they wanted us to do--to earn a fee, that is--except Emmett had hinted it could get hazardous.
I was irritated at Corky. He wasn't going to learn anything from that Eadie broad. Why she was there I couldn't guess, unless for balance. There was a guy named Leonard Conn--everybody called him Len--who evidently was part of some deal the Murdocks were trying to put across, and with the swapping, they'd most likely felt they needed an unattached woman to even things up. Anyhow, while Corky was content to make out with somebody new, I'd gotten Emmett's attention with the idea he might let some information slip when he got intimate enough.
That didn't take long, once he had me alone in the study. He isn't exactly bashful when he's sober, and he'd had a pretty enthusiastic go at the bar already. Not that I minded. I'm the cuddly type, five-one and a hundred and ten pounds, and it bothers me if some guy isn't making a try for some. Emmett went after it as if it were an industrial merger, being the live-wire promoter he is. I'd backed into the desk and rested my bottom against the edge, waiting to see how he meant to get things moving. And he didn't keep me guessing. He hardly took time to kick the door shut before he was right there in front of me.
"Don't know why you and Corky can't make it out to The Meadows once in a while," he muttered. "Don'tcha get Carol's notes?" He didn't give me much time to answer. He had one hand at the small of my back and the other between my shoulder blades. Big--six-two, about two-ten--he towered so high over me his thigh rode on my mons, and neither of us pretended that was an accident. When he bent and kissed me on the mouth, I let the stiffness go out of my legs so his knee could slide between my thighs. It was like riding a pony bareback, my pussy settling on that thick, hard-muscled leg of his.
He wasn't sloppy drunk, just high. His lips worked on mine with demanding gulps and his tongue drove clear to the back of my mouth. It felt good. I always have gotten a thrill out of a kiss that's honestly hungry, and I liked Emmett well enough to get pretty greedy myself. I sucked real hard and kind of mauled his tongue with mine and kept staring into those gold-flecked tiger-eyes of his. Sure, everything was out of focus at that range, but who cares! And I hung onto the back of his head and dug my fingers into the thick, carroty hair and wiggled against him.
Funny how much sensation there was. The study wasn't a big room, and with the wind gusting outside and the heating system going continuously, it was hot in there. That made things give off more scent than normal; the plastic on the sofa and armchair created a background odor that mingled with a dusty smell from the carpeting, and Emmett was already perspiring a little and giving off the aroma of his drinks. The White Shoulders cologne I'd used after my shower didn't seem exactly subtle to me any more, either.
The smells simply made me more aware of other sensations. Emmett had the sound system set for the hotel's piped music, and sentimental, stringed stuff supplied a romantic mood. I think there was an oldie on right then--Intermezzo, or something like that--and I could hear either Carol Murdock or Brenda Simone making "put-it-to-me" noises through the crack in the door, Emmett not having kicked it as hard as he'd thought. Naturally, I was sensitive to taste. His tongue had a flavor that mixed Scotch and tobacco and a hint of some minty mouthwash.
But the most intense senses were those of touch. His hands weren't still; he kept groping at me and squeezing the flesh on my back. I'm not terribly sensitive between my shoulder blades, although when I'm wearing a strapless, as I was, bare skin anywhere tingles when it's handled. The small of my back is different! His fingers probed into the muscles between my lower ribs and my hipbones and sent charges through me that made me squirm! The edge of the desk pressed into my butt, a hard, straight line digging deep into rounded mounds of tenderness. And he kept the muscles of his thigh contracting and relaxing so they sort of crawled against my pussy. I might as well not have had panties or a dress on for all they blunted the feeling.
So I squeezed my thighs on his and crowded my pussy down onto the ridge of his muscles and let wild tingles bounce around my crotch. The heat and my hair-trigger excitement sent flashes of heat surging through me and brought sweat out in a slippery layer. I could feel my belly churning as desire turned from general longing to a pinpoint knot of fire just inside my cuntmouth. My curiosity about the assignment he and his sex-for-breakfast wife, Carol, wanted Corky and me to take faded into the background.
I had all but forgotten how Emmett could turn me on. It might have been mental; his flaming appearance, with his skin freckle-mottled and almost as red as his hair, was so in keeping with the way he ate up competition in the financial world that a woman felt from the beginning she was going to get something special in the way of violent fucking. But he also had a sort of electric intensity around him that made my skin prickle and my breath catch a little.
He kept bending me further and further back, his mouth bruising my lips and his tongue choking me, while his thigh ground into my pussy's softness. The hand at the small of my back slipped around to my side and kneaded the flesh above my hip. His thumb probed into my belly muscles and made me twist. Then he pressed upward to clutch at one boob with sure, strong fingers. Like the advancing flames of a fire, pleasure licked inward through the quivering mound and shook me. I clung to him, my senses reeling as he turned down the front of my dress and the cups of my bra.
I've got good tits; they don't sag a damn bit, and that's more than most women can say when they've been chewed as much as me. That night, they stood out like proud gun turrets, nipples already erect and dark with my passion. Emmett fingered the pink buds. He plucked at them, rolled them between his fingertips, and rubbed their sharp-edged caps. In no time, I was jerking from side to side and jamming myself against him with short, hard thrusts. My cunt was on fire. It seemed to be trying to engulf his whole leg in its hunger.
But nipple-tweaking isn't Emmett's style. Some men would have spent a long time at it; they would have varied the pressure of their caresses and their speed and direction until they had turned me into a helpless, writhing blob of surrender. Not Emmett. He twisted a few times, plucked at the lump and let it snap back a few times, rolled each nipple briefly, and rubbed the top. Then he grabbed one whole boob in his hand and kneaded, his palm sweaty and hot against the hot, sweaty, sensitive mound he held. He pulled his mouth away from our kiss, dropped his other hand from my shoulder blades to the lower part of my back, and lowered his face to the other tit. He chewed on the inflamed nipple. He caught it in his mouth and sucked vigorously. And he pulled a great mouthful of flesh inside his mouth and sucked and chewed at the same time.
I moaned frantically. My hair had come loose and was swishing across my bare shoulders. My head hung back and I stared at the plastered ceiling without seeing it, my vision blurred by the wild movement his mouthing produced. My hands no longer clutched at his head, but scrabbled aimlessly. I grabbed at his shoulders and my fingers slipped. I caught at the hard flesh along his sides and then cupped my hands on his ass and pulled.
That was like pulling a trigger. He started grinding his thigh really hard on my pussy. My clitoris was trapped against the bony part of my pelvis, and when he began to crush it that way it felt like knives of excitement were slashing through me. I swung my knees wide and jerked my hips, then clamped my legs on his as tightly as I could. Waves of hunger rocked me. I moaned and clenched my teeth, desire a hard, beating force.
He let go of my boob and ran his hand down my side. He was bent far enough to reach most of the way down my thigh, and he groped at my dress until he had the hem wadded in his fingers. Sliding his hand back up and dragging the hem with it, he caressed the bare flesh between the top of my stocking and the edge of my panties. His touch was like that of a torch--a hot flame moving up the side of my leg. I gasped and twisted, while my knee came up and my foot left the floor.
He worked the wadded material over his wrist and rubbed my hip with the flat of his palm, only the filmy thickness of my panties between his skin and mine. Slowly, he turned down the top of the garment and worked it onto the swell of my asscheek. I squirmed eagerly while he worked his fingers around me, pushing the panties downward in back until they were trapped by the biting edge of the desk and in front until I could feel his fingertips in my pubic hair. He pulled me with his other arm, twisting me so one asscheek moved out and let the panties slip below the level of the desk top. In a moment, twisting me the other way, he had repeated the maneuver on the other side and the material of the rolled garment cut into me at the crease where my butt curved in to meet my thighs.
He slid his fingers between the hardness of his thigh and my pussy, the hair pulling and the soft tissues folding before his advance. Streaks of delight shot inward when he pushed at my clitoris, and my labia parted to admit the probing digits to my slippery gash. He felt me briefly, then shoved the panties further down. The crotch of the panties was wet and gooey on the inner sides of my thighs and I knew how thickly coated my pussy must be.
He stepped back slightly while he continued to work the flimsy garment over my thighs, and when he got it below my knees, I lifted one leg, then the other free, kicking the crumpled panties away. He twitched the front of my dress up and drove his thigh into the softness of my pussy again, the coarse weave rasping on tender flesh.
"Honey! Emmett, honey, you're going to get your pants all wet!"
"Who cares?" His thigh scrubbed at my inflamed cunt. "So they get pussy tracks on them. Worth it."
I couldn't protest; I was too excited to give a damn if he wanted to spend money on cleaning bills. All I could do was wiggle my hips and let my cunt gulp at the bulky leg. But I could do something with my hands besides grope at his ass. I moved them between us and unzipped his fly, then forced one hand inside and worked it through the opening in his shorts. All I could feel was a lot of wiry hair and the base of his hard-on, but by pushing upward I managed to get hold of the whole thick shaft.
With my free hand, I unfastened the waistband of his trousers. Wild with need, I tugged at his shorts until I had them off his hips and could grab his cock with both hands. It was hard and hot, and the head was sticky where his excitement had covered it with juice. I jerked at the shaft with one hand and caressed the bulbous cockhead with the fingers of the other. He was chewing on my tit again, and I was so hot I was sweating freely.
"Omigod, honey!" I exclaimed. "Honey, I've got to have some! Fuck me!"
"Want to get stuck right now? Just like that?"
"God, yes! We can get fancy later! Put some dick in me!"
"Okay! Great!"
He tipped me backward onto the desk, my ass on the edge and my legs unsupported. I lifted my feet and bent my knees, letting my thighs sag apart and laying my cunt open for him. He slid his feet apart until his cock was at the right level and used his hand to level it, setting the cockhead in the steamy pocket of my gaping pussylips.
When I felt the bulky knob seat itself on the rim of my cuntmouth, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, it felt so good.
"Oh, yes, honey!" I groaned with eagerness. "Stick it in! All the way in, Em!"
"God, you're wet! It's going to slide easy, puss."
"Yummm!"
He pushed, the fat lump stretching my cuntmouth and giving me a delicious sense of spreading.
"Ah-ah-ahhh! Deeeeep, honey!"
His hips surged. His cockhead plowed along the channel and buried itself deep in my belly. His shaft plunged after it, giving my cunt that full feeling and sliding across the rubbery ring of my cuntmouth with delightful, wet friction. The stiff bristles of his pubic hair stabbed my delicate membranes and flattened on them. His balls bumped my ass, their kinky hair tickling my asshole and making me flinch. I caught my heels on his butt and jerked at him, urging him to penetrate further.
It got pretty wild. The top of my dress was turned down around my waist, and my bra had worked its way down with it. Emmett pushed the front of my skirt up to uncover my belly and the material bunched at my waist with the top. From the waist up, my bare back pressed against the wood of the desk top, and my perspiration soon turned the gleaming surface into a slippery platform. My calves squeezed his waist and my heels dug at his ass. His hips jerked back and forth with my legs moving to keep pace. My tits jounced, surging back and forth on my chest, and I rolled my head from side to side in an ecstasy of excitement.
"Oh, God, honey! It feels like a piston!"
He grabbed my bouncing tits and hung onto them like fat handles while his cock plunged back and forth in me. With every stroke, the hardness at the base of his cock and across the fronts of his hips battered at my ass. The sensitive hollows where the inner sides of my thighs joined my crotch prickled from the abrasion of his pubic hair and glowed with growing heat at the continued buffeting. My torso slid back and forth on the desk, and I got the weird notion he would blast me right off the other side if I let go of his upper arms or lost my grip with my heels.
All of a sudden, everything went together. All my muscles were jerking in the same rhythm and my belly was churning in hard spasms. Pleasure exploded around his cockhead and I smashed my knees inward against his ribs in a convulsion of joy. Orgasmic contractions seized my cunt and my breath caught in my chest.
"Oof! Unhhh!" Emmett let go of my boobs and grabbed my waist, holding me while he ground his groin on the mangled tissues of my cunt. His cockhead wiggled up and down in my gut and I felt spastic twitches where my cuntmouth could sense the pressure at the base of his shaft. His cum spurted like wads from a shotgun, hot and fierce. The heat pooled in me. It reinforced the wild pleasure of my orgasm and made my spasms come faster. I dug my nails into his arms. My heels beat a rapid, jerky tattoo on his butt. He squeezed my sides brutally and jammed me harder onto the unyielding desk.
When my climax began to subside and his jism stopped welling into me, I weakly slid my legs around him and locked my ankles.
"Oh, God! Honey, honey! That was so good!" I panted, my lungs burning from the ferocity of the orgasm.
"You still fuck like a mink!" He chuckled and caressed my naked hips. "Always did like the way you got with it."
"You make it pretty special, Em!"
"Sure, sure. Bet you tell that to all the guys. Had enough for this time?"
"No! Oh, no, honey! That was just an appetizer!"
"Yeah? What are you going to do about this?" He wiggled to emphasize how soft his cock had gotten.
I had to laugh. "Poor thing! Oh, dear, did I make him shrivel up?" I squeezed him with my legs, a sharp tingle racing over me at the effort.
He just grunted. "You'll have to admit that dick isn't going to do much the way it is."
"It needs first aid," I murmured.
I stared into his eyes while my meaning soaked in. He gave me a slow, broad grin and pulled me to him, hugging me tightly.
"Okay, baby. All yours."
I slid off his cock and he let me down. Quickly, then, we finished undressing. We stood close to each other in the soft light, our naked bodies glistening with sweat and our flesh angry red where we had ground ourselves together. We snatched at each other, kissing feverishly with sudden affection, and I pushed hard against him, loving the sensation of intimacy. Then, laughing happily, we staggered to the couch, where I pushed him onto his back.
Dropping onto the edge of the couch by his chest, I bent over him and held his shrunken cock in one hand. The shaft was sticky with the residue of our fuck. I lowered my face over it and began to lick at the delicious coating. I nibbled and sucked until the whole shaft was free of the thick goo, then started stripping layers off his cockhead. The meaty bulb was soft and pulpy, and when I had removed the last trace of cum, I gulped it into my mouth. It was an effort, but I managed to get his whole cock in, compressing the soft flesh and sucking vigorously at it while I fingered his balls. I felt an occasional twitch in the base of his cock and ran my tongue around his cockhead with gentle, loving strokes.
He groaned. "Oh, shit, Mona! You really make a guy want to stiffen up!"
"Mmmm!" I teased him by rubbing my boobs on his hairy belly while I sucked at his cock.
He thrust one hand under me and buried his fingers in the damp heat of my cunt, making my hips jerk erratically. My hair had come undone and trailed across his groin and onto his balls. His dick started to harden and swell and I redoubled the force of my suction. As his hard-on came back, the base of his cock gradually slid outward between my clutching lips. His cockhead hardened and swelled; it pushed against the back of my throat and forced my head back. His thickening shaft thrust my jaws apart and thrilled me with its renewed pulsing.
I continued to suck, wildly excited by the quick results and the squirming of Emmett's hips. He plunged two fingers up my twat, his knuckles a bulky load at the mouth of my cunt. I worked at his cockhead with tenderness and love, bunching my tongue to scrub his winking slit and sucking fiercely to extract droplets of metallic-tasting, thin fluid. Bobbing my head up and down, I made my lips slide up and down the upper part of his shaft while my teeth kept bumping the back of his cockhead.
He tugged at my hips, his fingers impatient. Without loosening my hold on his cockhead or letting my hands be dislodged from the stiff shaft, I scrambled with my legs, stretching and reaching until I got astride him. His mouth closed on my pussy and his tongue jabbed into my gulping cuntmouth. The fire my orgasm had cooled sprang alive again. My hips thrust downward and my pussylips slid on his face. He moved me, hands tightly gripped on my hips, and gobbled my clitoris.
Furious jolts of passion slammed through me. I shuddered uncontrollably and let go of his balls for fear I would forget myself and squeeze them. Instead, I dragged my fingernails along his cock next to my lips and sucked harder at the throbbing bulb in my mouth.
He rubbed his hands over my back and along my sides. In my intense desire for him, I was pressing my belly to his chest, but his chin was under the bony arch of my pelvis and held my hips up, so I knew the full mounds of my asscheeks were elevated, shining wetly above everything else and spread to display the puckery pink ring of my anus.
His hips bumped up and down on the squeaky plastic of the couch as he fucked my mouth. And my knees skidded back and forth in pools of my own sweat. I felt the fingers of both his hands dipping into the honey at the mouth of my cunt and spreading the slick wetness over the surrounding flesh while he continued to chew at my clitoris. He jammed I don't know how many fingers into my gaping cuntmouth, and jagged shards of pleasure tore at me when he thrust something against my anus.
Jerking my mouth savagely up and down on his turgid cock, I drove back against the insistent finger while it wedged my ass open and plunged into me. With both cunt and ass full and my clitoris on fire with the delight of his chewing, I was rapidly approaching my second orgasm. It burst upon me in a blaze of sensations, my belly knotted and hard. I shook violently. My knees straightened and I pointed my toes, letting my weight ride on his jaw while I clamped onto his fingers. Convulsive spasms racked me. The blood pounded in my head until things started to go dark, and I swallowed eagerly at his pumping cock.
When my rigidity left me and the tension in my belly eased, I could no longer tolerate any touch on my clitoris; the tortured little organ felt as raw as if he had sucked the skin off. I flung my hips upward and jerked away from his mouth, my ass high in the air while I kept sucking and jerking at his cock.
Suddenly, he uttered an animal-like bellow and snapped his body upward beneath my head. His hips quivered and my fingers felt a hard, rhythmic jerking at the base of his cock. Thick ropes of jism welled into my throat and ballooned my cheeks. With desperate gulps, I swallowed the viscid fluid, sucking harder to keep it from squirting out at the corners of my lips. Gulp after gulp poured from his twitching cock, and I beat my fist up and down the rigid shaft to coax still more of the delicious cum from him. At last the flow stopped. I washed the softening prick dry with my tongue and extracted the final stringy residue from my teeth. With soft kisses, I released his exhausted dick and watched his scrotum relax and his balls settle away from his crotch. We held each other, then, his face hot against my cooling pussy and my lips still gently kissing his cockhead.
Our fucking had been a reopening of a game I hadn't played for months; I smiled to myself with pleasure at the thought Corky and I would be swapping with experts for a while, even if we decided not to take the Murdocks' assignment.
CHAPTER TWO
Corky and Emmett's wife, Carol, were feeling each other up when Emmett and I got back to the living room. I didn't see any sign of the Simones or Len or Eadie. I paused for a second, as Emmett did, to enjoy the primitive scene. Corky is still a good-looking guy, even if it does seem we've been married a long time. I mean, he's like a Goddamn sex machine and man-eating tiger, all rolled into one. He's got salt-and-pepper-colored hair that he keeps cut in a trim crewcut. He's got gray-blue eyes and a prominent jaw and a real crooked nose. He's six feet two, the same as Emmett Murdock, but he's lean and tough, rather than bulky. The way his cock sticks out of that tangle of black pubic hair, it makes my pussy squirm every time I look at it.
He and Carol were lounging on the floor. They both had the sleepy, self-satisfied grins you get when you've had a real good fuck, and I already knew Corky had started off by getting his dick into that Eadie broad. That meant these two were working up to seconds or thirds and weren't in a frantic hurry. But Carol could have fooled me the way she was rolling around on the floor.
Horny as my husband looked with his hand halfway into her twat and his cock standing at attention, she looked more so. She's a striking woman, I tell you! The fact she and Emmett are wallowing in money means she can get all kinds of massages and facials and all that stuff, but she's got a great body to start with. She's about five feet four, probably weighs one-twenty, has luscious, globular cans and real round, jiggly asscheeks, and her waist pinches in so it makes the men's mouths water. With hair that's halfway between brown and blonde and a mat at her pussy that's almost pure blonde, and with big, baby-blue eyes and a pug nose and little-girl mouth, she makes a picture.
For a minute, they didn't see us. As I said, Corky had his hand half buried in her cunt, and she was hanging onto his dick with one hand and flopping around like she was having a fit. They weren't making a lot of noise, just grunting at each other and Carol letting out a little squeal now and then.
She really did squeal when she saw Emmett and me. "Christ's sake, you two! Thought you were busy!"
Her husband laughed. "Came up for air. You mind?"
"How come you got dressed?" she asked. "Mona didn't want to give anybody a head start. Figured if either of the other guys wanted to get in her pants, he'd have to go after it like I did."
That was a lie; we'd dressed because that was usually the way we worked it at swaps. I mean, we didn't put on one of those mass orgies very often, and I didn't feel comfortable running around naked in a crowd. But I didn't contradict Emmett. After all, he might be our employer before long.
After studying the couple on the floor with a critical expression, Emmett asked, "Where the hell's everybody else? Way I remember, you took off with Jerry Simone and Corky was disappearing with that Ferris girl. What happened?"
Corky chuckled. "You nosy bastard, why don't you let us alone? We're just getting down to the meat of things!"
But Carol broke free with a giggle. "Come on, Corky, admit it; we were just killing time and getting reacquainted."
"Yeah, I guess so. Anyhow, I know where to find you when I get hungry again."
Emmett persisted. "Where did the others go?"
"Damn it, Em, how should we know?" Carol shook her head. "That raunchy Jerry had a wild hair up his ass... got me into the vestibule and doubled me over the back of that Goddamn little love seat. Christ! Like to pounded me right through it! Thought my tits were going to flop off, the way he was clobbering my ass with his belly! About the time he finished pumping me up with his cum, he staggered off and started making funny noises. Said something about feeling lousy--something about flu or like that--and shoved off."
Corky grinned. "Eadie kind of faded out after the second fuck, too. Acted real embarrassed and told me she never had gotten into a swap deal before. Needed to let it settle overnight before she'd be able to face the rest of you." He winked at me. "I think she was worrying about how you were going to take it, baby." He was quiet for a minute, as if reliving his experience with that big, auburn-haired athlete. "She sure was hot when we started! Son of a bitch! Never did get beyond the dining room with her! Even Len and Brenda got past us! From the noise, I bet they knocked every pot in the kitchen on the floor!"
Carol looked startled. "You mean we've got that perfectly beautiful king-size bed and nobody used it?"
Emmett grunted. "Bunch of Goddamn jerks. The maid is going to be pissed off tomorrow if that kitchen's a mess. We said we wouldn't be using it."
His wife giggled and stretched, her boobs rising as if they were balloons. "She'll never know the difference, if we put the stuff back on the hooks. Come on! Let's take a look at a bedroom nobody's fucked in tonight!"
We trooped into the bedroom Before I could even see past Carol, she stopped me with a shriek.
"Emmett! Em, look at the mess!"
We crowded past her to find the room incredibly littered. I've made my share of illegal searches, but I never once left a room torn up the way their bedroom was! Every drawer was out. Their clothes were scattered as if they'd been caught in a tornado. The bed was stripped and the mattress was tilted onto the floor. The lamps at the head of the bed were both shattered, and the mirror over the dresser had been taken off the wall. A little boudoir chair was upside down.
I caught a horrified glance that passed between Carol and Emmett. Corky gave me a quick, significant look out of the corner of his eye. Carol dived at the waste basket beside the tiny telephone stand while Emmett sprang toward the bathroom.
Corky and I drew closer together and watched. It was clear the Murdocks had something in that room they knew somebody else would be looking for. Unconsciously, I let my hand steal across him and close on his peter. It was one of the nice features about a nice guy, and I wasn't passing up the chance to squeeze it a little.
Carol tipped the waste basket upside down and shrieked again. "Ohhh, no! Em, they got this one!"
"Oh, shit! Double shit!" He bounded out of the bathroom and dropped to his knees, studying the bottom of the basket. "Lousy bastards!"
"How about the others?" his wife asked.
"Still there. But they dumped half the stuff out of the bottles in the medicine cupboard."
"What did they get?" asked Corky. "Or is it a big secret?"
Emmett turned and studied us. He looked like he had wheels turning around in his head. At last, he sighed and helped Carol to her feet. She sagged against him, her eyes wild.
"Tell them, Em," she whispered. "We need them, now."
We went back to the living room, Carol rejecting our offer to help straighten the ransacked bedroom. I dropped onto the couch and Corky began to dress. Emmett poured stiff drinks and passed them around, frowning and muttering to himself. Finally, he sank into an armchair and stared broodingly at me over his glass.
"Okay. Wasn't sure whether to ask you to help or not," he said. "Thought for a while we'd just pay you something for the time you'd lost and say I'd bought some good fucking. Trouble is, we got another kind of fucking, and we need some experts."
"That's us," remarked Corky unnecessarily. "Yeah. I know. You two remember the first job you took for us?"
I did. We had come as close as I ever wanted to get to downright larceny that time. I mean, the Murdocks aren't above a marginal deal if the profits look right, and that time they had. Somebody had stolen a rare book and Emmett and Carol knew who. They knew the reward that was being offered for its return, too. Now they wouldn't turn anybody in, no matter what the reward, but they weren't above hiring Corky and me to steal the book from the original thief.
Corky remembered, too. "Yeah. What about it?" he asked.
"Looks like we're going to need something like that again."
"Huh? No thanks, friend. That gets too sticky!"
He was just playing hard to get. I knew he wouldn't hang back, but if he could make Emmett think so, he might lever the fee up a notch or two.
Emmett acted as if he knew Corky didn't mean that about sticky. He narrowed his eyes. "Shelton, we've had you and Mona on about a half-dozen jobs. You never have turned us down because something might get sticky. You wouldn't already have another client, would you?"
I don't know how long it took for that to sink in, but Corky started turning red around his ears and the flush spread across his face and down his neck to his shoulders. I could see his muscles starting to bunch and his jaw twitching the way it does when he's mad as hell. He sort of edged toward Emmett with his hands opening and shutting. The flesh at the corners of his mouth had knotted and turned white.
"Murdock, a man doesn't want to get caught sitting down when he makes a crack like that." My husband's voice sounded like a chain saw going through cheese.
Emmett didn't flinch, and his gaze was steady as he met the fury in Corky's eyes. "You're wrong, Corky. If a man knows you, that's the only time he'd dare. You wouldn't make a move until I was on my feet."
"Well, get on them, then!"
"Not yet. You want to give me an answer?"
"Answer! You son of a bitch, what makes you think you're entitled to one?"
"Professional courtesy, maybe. What I want to know, Shelton, is whether anybody else has gotten to you about this deal?"
Corky was getting angrier by the second. Emmett seemed to be picking exactly the wrong things to say, and I was sure he was going to get a mouthful of knuckles before much longer.
But Corky paused, balancing on the balls of his feet, and spoke in a silky, dangerous tone. "Okay, friend. You telephoned us to come out here. Right? Said if we would, you'd pay round trip air fare and a week in the hotel. We had to call you back, because we were already on an insurance case. You remember?"
Emmett nodded without saying anything.
"Okay! We called you back an hour later, after we'd worked out the other thing for another investigator to handle it for us. And you wired the money for the flight. Now, if I accept money from a man, I'm not in a position to work for somebody to his detriment. That make sense?"
"It's one way of running a business."
"It's our way."
"Okay." Emmett shrugged.
As abruptly as it had started, the clash appeared to be over. I was surprised when Corky bent toward Emmett with the kind of grin he used when he put somebody to sleep.
"I figure I owe you something on account for that question, Murdock. We'll get back to it someday."
I didn't like the sound of that. It meant Corky was going to see to it Emmett got the shaft, sooner or later. And I did like the man. Besides, I was half afraid Corky would make it a physical thing. He'd always handled himself well, but Emmett wasn't soft, and he outweighed my husband by a lot of pounds.
Emmett acted as if Corky had said nothing. "Tell you what. It's time you knew why we asked you to come. You know the story of the Brighton Diamonds?"
Who didn't! Huge, pear-shaped, smoky things as big as a man's fist! Four of them! From the beginning, their ownership had been in doubt. The story was a miner had found all four in a single pocket and hidden them in the mine until he could work out a way to smuggle them away. In that, he had succeeded. He'd lined up a buyer, too, only the buyer had been far ahead of him. The miner--no one ever knew for sure which mine--had vanished and the buyer had slipped out of Africa with a fortune in uncut stones. For a time, they remained uncut; they passed from one set of hands to another, leaving a dark, bloody trail in their wake.
Somewhere along the line, there had been time for a diamond cutter in Amsterdam to apply his skill to them. A matched set, then, they had appeared briefly, dangling across a queen's chest and distracting everyone's attention from the daring of her naked boobs. (She'd privately let it be known there was no other way to do them--either the diamonds or her boobs--justice.) But the queen had been little more fortunate than any of the former "owners". True, she stayed alive, but the diamonds had disappeared within days of that one public display.
For three years, the Smoky Quads, as some imaginative reporters liked to call them, or the Brighton Diamonds, as they were generally known, might as well have been invisible. The popular press had speculated for some time they'd been lost or destroyed. There were circles whose edges touched our lives from time to time, however, in which better information circulated. More blood was running and more avaricious dealers fondled the stones briefly. In time, the risk of handling the Brighton Diamonds would cause somebody to cut them down. Instead of four pears, there would be some greater number of merely big pieces. Or, if luck ran right, somebody would reach out with sufficient resources and strength to establish ownership by prolonged possession.
All in all, my recollection of the stones gave me no hint as to Emmett's interest. In the first place, filthy rich as he was, he didn't belong in the league where that kind of money circulated. In the second, he might be pretty sharp in some of his promotions and might dabble at the edges of the criminal domain, but he had no armed security and took no action that could bring on a confrontation with the more violent syndicate types.
Emmett appeared to understand the kind of thoughts Corky and I were indulging in; he leaned back and tented his fingertips and waited.
Corky spoke first. "We know the story. Can't see how it would concern us--or you."
"You know what a kiss of death they've been to the people who had them."
"Exactly."
"Those people were thieves or smugglers, almost all of them. They lived in the hot-jewelry world, Shelton. Every damn one except that queen, and I hear she'd rather wear stolen stuff than legit."
"So?"
"So they only knew one way to play. When you've got something hot, you move it through whatever contacts you've made through the years. Jewelry types again."
"Okay." Corky sounded as if he knew what was coming.
I was sure I did, and I wanted it not to be true. My belly was churning already with the hope Emmett and Carol hadn't gotten themselves into that kind of hole.
Emmett smiled faintly. "One of those guys got smart. Well, maybe it was desperation. Anyhow, the Simones and us... we were in Europe a couple of months ago. Just soaking up atmosphere, you understand. And we spent some time in Berne."
We knew the Murdocks had an account in one of those famous Swiss banks. It was a status thing with them, and they reported to the IRS people regularly, but they did have money there.
"Easy to meet people in a place like that." Emmett was enjoying himself. He dragged out the story, relishing every nuance of it.
The Simones had a Swiss account, too, he made us understand. Not as fat as the Murdocks', of course; after all, Jerry Simone was just a dentist and couldn't be expected to put it together the way Emmett had. Anyhow, the two couples had been approached in Berne by a frightened man who felt the forces of his own kind closing in on him. His cash resources were gone and his only hope of evading the assassins he feared was to replenish them. In the end, the Murdocks had paid him three-fourths and the Simones the remaining fourth of his price. The Murdocks had taken three and the Simones the fourth of the Brighton Diamonds.
Through delicate, lengthy maneuvers Emmett didn't describe for us, the two couples had arrived at a tenuous agreement to sell the stones to "a party" whose assets included personal protection that might enable him to proclaim his ownership of the jewels publicly--and defend it.
"In a way, we're the first legal owners," Emmett claimed with a smile. "We did pay the duty on the damn things when we brought them into the States, and nobody else had done that anywhere."
Carol made her first contribution to the story. "That's how this guy got wind of the fact we had them."
"So where do we fit in?" asked Corky.
"Ownership isn't all that cut and dried," admitted Emmett. "The fact is, the customs people let us get away with murder. We didn't identify the diamonds as the Smoky Quad--came back a different route than the Simones and only had the three--and there's some behind-the-scenes juggling going on with that queen putting pressure on people in the State and Justice Departments to confiscate them. Privately, we've been told we'll probably be okay as long as we keep out of the limelight. Let anything break in the news, and we're going to lose them, sure as hell."
Corky looked puzzled, but I began to see the light.
"So you're here to peddle the diamonds and you expected something like that bedroom thing," I suggested.
He nodded. "Len's identified himself to our satisfaction. He's the go-between we were supposed to meet here. But we've had strained relations with Jerry and Brenda ever since we bought the diamonds; I think they're frosted over the fact we managed to cut in for three out of four. They're dealing independently, and I wouldn't put it past that chiseling tooth-puller to make a deal for two instead of one." He paused, then added, "Or maybe for all four."
"I'm still not sure what you wanted us to do," Corky told him. "We don't hire out as guards; you know that."
"All right. I do know that. It was more like a hunch. I really didn't know what you could do... got you out here because something told me you two might come in handy, that's all. Well, I guess you will. I want you to recover that diamond for us. Nice and quiet like."
"You're pretty sure the Simones took it. Where does Eadie Ferris come into the picture?"
Carol grinned. "You got into her pants tonight. Where do you think she fits? It's pretty obvious Lennie's combining pleasure with his business."
"He brought her?" I asked. How a guy of Len Conn's dubious class had swung such a deal with a girl like Eadie would be a greater mystery than the diamond, I thought.
Carol nodded. "We didn't. And the Simones didn't know her."
It was too late to do anything that night. We didn't even accept the assignment. We promised to think about it and give them an answer after we'd had a chance to evaluate our chances.
The next morning, we parked Tom at the swimming pool--a fifteen-year-old son can be a problem when you run into a swap--and set off to get acquainted with the people who seemed to be involved in the case. We felt we had a pretty good line on Jerry and Brenda Simone; we'd spent quite a bit of time with them on two earlier assignments we'd handled for the Murdocks. Conn and the Ferris girl were different.
When we found Len Conn, he wasn't inclined to be very informative. And Corky got a little impatient.
"Conn, we know you're the guy the Murdocks came here to meet. We won't say anything about the merchandise, but you're here to represent the buyer."
"Frankly, I can't see how that's any of your business. If it were true, you still don't fit into the picture. You got anything to sell?" His glance flicked over me.
Now, he didn't mean anything by the glance. I knew that and so did Corky. But in our business there's an advantage in being able to impress the idea on a guy that he isn't invulnerable. Corky uses me as an excuse.
He intercepted Len's glance and surged out of his chair and halfway over the table. Before Len could even look startled, Corky had him by the front of his shirt and had jerked him forward.
"What do you mean by that crack, you son of a bitch?" Corky snarled.
Dark and slender, Len Conn was athletic in a purposeful way. I could see he was weighing the odds, fast, like a computer. Apparently they didn't look good to him. Hate flared in his eyes, then faded as he assumed a mask of imperturbability.
"Got me wrong, friend. Dead wrong."
A hotel dining room isn't the best place for that kind of scene. On the other hand, it isn't the worst, necessarily, especially when your table is screened by tubs of tropical stuff. There's enough privacy for pretty intimate confrontation, while the presence of other patrons helps keep things from getting too explosive. Corky could play that kind of situation like a master.
He shook Len from side to side, gently, like a dog shaking a puppy. "I don't think you understand, man. I don't play games where you say something with your mouth and something else with your eyes. I believe in honest communication."
"Goddamn it!" Len kept his voice low, but he had plenty of feeling in it. "Why would I imply what you're saying? With parties like the one last night I'd be out of my mind to queer my chances!"
He was right, of course. The next time--or the time after that--he and I would get off by ourselves. If he liked the idea, he would be an idiot to antagonize me. But Corky knew that, too; he was just giving Len something to think about.
"We'll let it go at that," he whispered, his gaze boring into Len's eyes. "We'll let it go at that for now. Just keep it in mind I like a man's mouth saying the same thing his eyes do." He let go of Len, having gotten across the point he could probably stomp the smaller man into the deck if he wanted to.
I knew Len had gotten the message. He dropped into his chair and tried to smooth his shirt. And his voice sounded shaky. "So I'm here to negotiate a purchase. The agreement was, no outsiders. Murdock was the one who made an issue of that."
He managed a tight grin. "Way I get it, he was afraid my people would get the notion of knocking him off and getting what we were after without having to pay for it. So how come he rang you in?"
"Insurance against somebody stealing his merchandise."
"Like who?"
"Like you, maybe. Or the Simones. How come you're meeting two sellers at the same time in the same place?"
I gasped. Even for Corky, that was going pretty far out. Emmett hadn't even hinted there was anything unexpected about Brenda and Jerry being here. But Corky had evidently caught something I'd missed, because Len got defensive right away.
"That's the buyer's option. Look, man, if you know so much already, you know there's four chunks of that merchandise. The buyer wants all four or no deal. He doesn't give a damn who he buys them from, so long as they're all together when he gets them." He leaned forward and abruptly changed the subject. "Now. Where does that Ferris broad come in?"
"Huh?" Corky and I exclaimed simultaneously.
Len pressed the question. "Where does she come in? Murdock figure he can get a better price by having an extra piece around?"
For a second, I thought Corky was going to repeat his earlier performance. Len's sudden expression of alarm convinced me he thought so, too.
"Never mind!" Len said hurriedly. "Don't know why that question pisses you off, but forget I asked."
I knew why, then. Corky didn't have an answer, but he didn't want Len to know that. I mean, an investigator has to make the other guy think he knows at least a little about everything. So we looked for Eadie. It turned out she was out by the pool, where I noticed Tom eyeing her secretly. Tom saw us almost as soon as I saw him. He looked away from Eadie right away, then made a show of going back into the water. It occurred to me he was growing up faster than I had realized.
It turned out Eadie was even more uncommunicative than Len. And Corky couldn't very well rough her up the way he had Len. For that matter, I wasn't going to try bluffing her right then, either. In the first place, she was six or seven inches taller than me and probably outweighed me by thirty pounds or more. She was the outdoor type, too, with muscles inside those finger-licking-good curves, and to take her I would have had to resort to tactics you don't advertise.
"I wouldn't admit this to just anyone," she said with the kind of shiver that should have made her look gawkish but didn't. "But when I did realize the kind of party I'd gotten into last night, I just couldn't break away!" She fluttered her eyelashes at Corky, then gave me an apologetic smile. "I mean, I didn't know anything about all this swapping stuff, and there was something about you men that turned me on like a light! Like a cage full of tigers!"
"How come you're in the suite you've got?" I asked
"What?" She looked offended. "Why not? That's where the management put me!"
Maybe Len was right, I thought. The Murdocks had reserved the whole floor, and the Simones had some kind of arrangement with them. From what we'd learned in our talk with Len, that arrangement might have been made late and on the spur of the moment. They surely hadn't done that with Eadie, or they would have told us. If they had brought her--or arranged for her to be here--they were playing some game they didn't want us to know about.
Things seemed to be getting jumbled, but that was normal for us; no case falls out nice and clean at the start. I saw Eadie had a thing for Corky--that she was remembering some of what they'd done the night before--and suspected he might be able to sweet-talk something out of her if I took off. So I excused myself, gave Tom the evil eye, and went back to our floor. A brief nap would come in handy.
Inside our suite, I got undressed and took a quick, hot shower to get properly relaxed. Instead of rubbing down with the towel, I sort of blotted myself, then started out of the bathroom ready for sleep.
With a jar that sounded like an explosion inside my head, the whole world burst into stars. I had a split second of semi consciousness while I spiraled down in the darkness, and I knew I'd been slugged. But the knowledge faded faster than it had come.
CHAPTER THREE
When I came to, I was sprawled on the bed, face down. My arms were outflung and one leg lay along the edge of the mattress while the other hung over the side. I was only dimly aware of my position; my head hurt too much. The moment I recovered the first spark of intelligence, I knew I'd been sapped by an expert. The pain was localized, for the most part. One spot behind my ear felt as if it were at the sharp end of a pick. The rest of my head simply had a fuzzy, throbbing kind of ache.
I groaned, and somebody knelt beside me on the bed and held a cold, wet compress to the sore spot. That's the only thing that really works on a lump like I had, and the agony subsided fast. I groaned again and turned my head experimentally.
"It's still there." It was Len's voice, sounding sympathetic and amused.
"What is?"
"Your head." He took the compress away and the pain stabbed at me ferociously. "Once more," he remarked. "Got to get this cold again. Don't move."
Hell! I wasn't going to move! If I did, I'd have that headache for a week! When he came back, he rested his leg at the back of mine, his knee brushing my pussy, and bent over me to apply the cloth. Funny; I knew how I was sprawled and where his knee was. I knew what that probably meant. But all I cared about was the miraculous relief that cold, wet cloth brought to my head. The pain lessened and my mind cleared. I knew I was going to be all right.
He took the cold rag away and began massaging my neck and shoulders with skillful fingers. Anybody who gets slugged in the head is going to be tense when he comes to, and the knots in my muscles loosened almost audibly as he found one of them after another.
"Damn good thing he left the doors ajar when he came after you." Len grunted. "If I hadn't heard that yell you made when he hit you, I think he'd have killed you."
"Who?"
"Don't know. I'm not a hundred percent sure it was a man, when you get right down to it." He found some fresh knots at the lower edge of my shoulder blades. "Whoever it was must have heard me coming. The drapes were still moving when I got in here."
"You didn't look out?"
"With you looking like you were dead? Sorry, love. I got you onto the bed and started trying to bring you out of it." In the soft flesh between my ribs and hip bones, he picked out some deep muscles with real knots. "Looks to me like somebody thinks you and your husband ought to keep your noses out of this Murdock thing."
I didn't say anything right away. His fingers were digging so deep they'd pinpointed nerves on either side of my spine that were connected to sex! I clawed at the bedspread and gasped. The leg that hung over the bed jerked forward, and Len's leg moved smoothly with it, holding it in the new location and spreading my pussy even more.
Then I said something. "What the hell you think you're doing!" I demanded. "Get your knee out of my twat!"
"Oh, come on, now! Best thing in the world for working off the stiffness after getting knocked Out like that!"
"Knock it off, you bastard!" I knew the son of a bitch was lying. The blow I'd gotten had been as precise as a surgeon's scalpel. In the first place, there was no way I could have yelled; that particular knockout blow specifically paralyzes the diaphragm for about a second and a half. Jars some motor nerve or other. In the second place, whoever had hit me had meant no worse damage than a few minutes' unconsciousness or he'd have hit me somewhere else. Len hadn't heard a damn thing. Chances were about a hundred to one, he'd wielded the sap, himself. And now he was after a piece of ass, besides.
I repeated myself. "Knock it off!"
"Just pretend it's nighttime again, love. You'll like it."
I started to squirm and reached for his hands, but he had the advantage. He might be smaller than Corky, but he was a real specimen of manhood, just the same. He caught my wrists and crossed them and pinned them to the small of my back, holding them with one hand. He moved his feet so one shin held each of my legs where it was and grabbed my snatch with his other hand.
I wasn't surprised at the fiery delight that surged over me. I had gotten good vibes from him the night before and expected to have him balling me before Corky and I left the hotel. So the only thing that had me pissed off was the way he was making it seem like rape. Unfortunately, rape is a thing that antagonizes me, and I could be excited as hell and still resent it.
He dragged his fingertips through the hair on my pussylips. The flesh tingled and sharp pulses of pleasure jabbed inward. Each pulse made the muscles of my belly and thighs jerk, bouncing my ass into the air. I twisted my shoulders and clenched my teeth, furious at my reaction.
"Goddamn it! Quit that!" I panted with rage.
"Hey! Feels great, doesn't it!" He chuckled and slid his fingers closer to my gash.
"Corky'll kill you! You dumb shit!"
"I doubt it. I don't think you're going to tell him."
I should have gotten scared. I should have wondered if he meant to kill me after dicking me. Instead, it sounded to me like he meant I was going to like it too well to make trouble.
He was still busy, and signals were racing through me so fast they tumbled over each other. I felt a warm, gushing sensation in my cunt; I was already getting wet! There was a kind of tightness in my labia, too, and I knew they were starting to swell and spread. His fingertips reached the edge of the hair and stroked lightly over the inner, hairless membranes.
"Yaghhh!" I hadn't meant to give him the satisfaction of hearing that kind of exclamation, but I couldn't help it. The delicious warmth of excitement had welled too suddenly for me to catch myself.
I tried to make up for it by fighting. I threw my hips from side to side and tried to curl up. He jammed his fingers into my gash and thrust one into my cunt. I nearly strangled on the delighted squeal that came into my throat! With his thumb in the crack of my ass, he lifted me by the cunt and shoved at my leg with his. My other leg slipped off the bed, and he pulled his fingers out of me. Before I understood what he was doing, he straightened my torso across the mattress and scrambled onto it himself. He pinned my arms at my sides and straddled me, facing my ass and trapping my arms with his knees. With both hands free, he began kneading my asscheeks.
I was totally helpless and knew it. My tits were squashed into the mattress and I was rubbing my face raw against the bedspread. My ass is pretty sensitive, so every squeeze sent new thrills over me.
I couldn't begin to hold my legs still. In spite of myself, my knees would jerk apart and dig at the side of the bed. I'd realize what I was doing and clamp them together, then they'd snap apart again. In desperation, I kicked at his hands, my heels smacking against my butt loudly. But he caught my ankles and pulled, forcing my feet alongside my hips so my thighs spread and my knees rose. When he let go, I made sure I didn't get my feet where he could reach them again.
I gave up trying to keep my knees together, too, and he started grubbing at my pussy again. The more he felt me up, the wilder I felt. I'd reached the point where I didn't care if it was rape or not; I just wanted to get fucked. I braced my toes against the carpet and shoved, poking my ass into the air and making my pussy shake with the exertion of my thighs. He pried my labia apart, crushing them and exposing my gaping cuntmouth. I could feel the rubbery ring stretching and cool air penetrating the wet interior.
I kept opening my mouth to yell at him--to beg him to fuck me--then snapping it shut with enraged disgust at myself. At last, I caught a mouthful of the bedspread between my teeth and chewed on it furiously to avoid saying anything. But he must have sensed the state I'd reached. He clambered off me and crossed my wrists at the small of my back again. By twisting my neck, I could see he was using one hand to undress himself, and I knew I'd feel that fine cock of his very soon.
When he was naked, his cock looking as inflamed as if somebody had been pounding it, he got behind me and knelt. I'm not clear in my mind whether he actually kneed my legs apart or not. It's just as likely I spread them for him, I was so eager by then. All I remember for sure is how delicious it felt when he shoved that thick cockhead against the rim of my cunt. The nose buried itself so easily I could tell how wet I was. And he snapped his hips and slammed his whole cock into me in a single plunge.
I did yell, then. Maybe rape does something to sharpen sensation. It seemed to me there were millions of pleasure nerves all the way from my cuntmouth to the inner end of my vagina. His hard-on wasn't as big as Corky's or Emmett's, but it felt like the biggest bone I'd ever had shoved up me.
He banged away at me while I surged back and forth on the mattress and mumbled to myself. My belly was on fire, and I was hanging onto the bedspread again. He wasn't even holding me--just sort of clutching at my asscheeks. But I wasn't about to try to get away, not with that glorious cock jerking in and out. The hair on his belly scratched my ass and the ridges of his thighs ground against the softer, inner flesh of my own. There wasn't a piece of skin he touched that didn't tingle My ass bounced and I thrust myself onto his cock with fierce blows. Lust was like a wildfire in me and I couldn't seem to flatten my pussy hard enough on him.
He got his hands under my hips and lifted, rising to his feet and pulling my butt into the air so I still hung on his cock. I wrapped my legs around him and flopped back and forth as his fucking got more violent. Because of my new, head-down position, his cock was pointed at a downward angle, and it felt weird as it pistoned back and forth in me.
His balls were bumping my mound, too, nudging my clit every time they hit. The whole thing seemed to catch me in a chaos of sensation I couldn't absorb, and I felt my belly knot dangerously With a great surge of pleasure, I broke into an orgasm. I went rigid and scissored my legs, squeezing convulsively as inner spasms racked me. He clamped me to him when I started to come, crushing me onto the base of his cock and letting me grind myself against the bulge behind it. I shuddered violently, then collapsed. My legs went limp and my feet dropped, dangling against his shins. Only dimly did I realize he hadn't come with me.
He continued to hold me, supporting my weight with his hands while he pulled his dick out of me. With a grunt, he bent and slid one forearm under my belly, then used his other hand to position the rigid cock.
"No, Len! Jesus, no!" I cried out in alarm when I felt the slimy nose of his cockhead nudge my anus. "Not that!"
He acted as if he hadn't even heard me. Slick with juice, his cockhead wedged my ass open and edged inward. My rectum stretched and yielded, admitting more and more of that brutal knob. Flaming pains shot through me with every pulsebeat. I smashed at the mattress with my fists and lashed at it with my toes. Suddenly, the back ridge of his cockhead plunged through and my ass tightened around his shaft. He slammed against me, then, driving his cock full length into my gut and blasting his belly against my ass.
The burning subsided and harsh waves of excitement began to arouse me again. Len swung me forward until I could rest my knees on the bed, then knelt behind me and fucked savagely. His hands groped beneath my belly until he could grab my tits. Squeezing hard, he held me in position while he battered my ass. I supported myself on my forearms, my hair a veil around my face and my knees well spread.
He fucked with long, smooth strokes. His cock rose out of the funnel of my ass until his cockhead hung up on the taut, distended sphincter, then plunged inward with the flesh of my ass clinging to his shaft and surging inward with it. His belly smashed against my asscheeks with a loud slapping noise with every thrust, and my whole body rocked. His blows were so hard they drove the air from my lungs, and I let out a coughing grunt every time. There was no more pain; it was all pleasure, and I felt myself winding up to another orgasm.
It hit all of a sudden. Great, tearing spasms seized me. My asshole bit down on the buried cock and my belly snapped taut with violent, wrenching contractions in my guts. I sobbed wildly. Rigid and straining, my body shook in the grip of an intense, prolonged tremor.
He let go of my tits and hugged me around the waist. His entire weight lay on my ass while I ground myself against him. With a final, ferocious spasm, I felt the tension snap and collapsed under him.
He lay on me for a time, his body wet with sweat and his cock still hard and fat. Saying nothing, he caressed my trembling body. The exhaustion of two orgasms drained me, but his continued fondling prevented the excitement from subsiding.
"For God's sake!" I gasped, crushed by his body. "Aren't you ever going to make it?"
"Oh, sure! No sweat."
The hell there wasn't any sweat! We were bathed in it! And Corky was bound to show up sooner or later. He'd kill Len if he found out I was getting raped.
Len dragged that hard-on out of my ass without an apology. I thought he was turning me inside out! It hung up bad enough to lift my hips right off the bed. But it broke loose with a loud "plop" and I dropped back limply. I didn't even know what he was doing when he rolled me onto my back. It didn't take long for me to become aware, though. He crawled past me and got off the bed. Hands under my armpits, he pulled me backward until my head and shoulders hung over the side of the bed. My back arched horribly and I braced my hands on the carpet, twisting to reach a more comfortable position.
He knelt, his pecker right in my face and his balls before my eyes. It hit me what he was after and I rebelled. If I wanted to suck a guy off, I liked to do it my own way in my own time.
"No, you don't!" I told him. "I'll be damned if I will!"
He laughed and grabbed his cock. Tilting it down, he pushed the head against my lips. I clamped my jaws and jerked my head to the side.
"Oh, shit, woman! You know that isn't going to help!"
"Fuck you!" I exclaimed between clenched teeth.
He let go of his cock and laid his hands on either side of my neck, his thumbs at the joints of my jaw. With steadily increasing pressure, he squeezed until my mouth opened all the way. He had to crouch to line up his cock, but he held my mouth open and slid his cockhead all the way into it. I had a wild notion I'd bite as soon as he released the pressure of his thumbs, but I was sure he'd kill me in his rage if I did.
"Better not bite, Mona," he muttered as he eased the pressure. "Know what I mean?"
I nodded with a mouthful of prick and he let go. There was no question who was in control. His hips were moving gently back and forth and the bulge at the front of his cockhead kept bumping the arch of my throat. I started to suck, and he began massaging my boobs again. Clutching at his thighs, I managed to ease myself back onto the bed until it supported my shoulders, but he wouldn't let me go any further. My head hung over the side, trapped against the edge of the mattress.
As I sucked, he continued the easy fucking motion going and his cockhead worked its way slowly into my throat. I was terrified! I knew a woman wouldn't take a hard-on in her throat; it would strangle her! But there was still a bit of air getting through with each breath, and there was a king of awful excitement about getting that much cock inside my mouth. I sucked harder and began to swallow. A moment later, the swelling at the base of his cock pressed against my lips and his balls lay against the bridge of my nose. For the first time in my life, I had a fully erect dick all the way into my mouth!
I was still breathing, and in spite of the ghastly sense of pressure in my throat, I sucked fiercely. My throat kept swallowing continuously, unable to force its load into my stomach, and I saw Len's thighs jerking. He fucked; his hips pumped as if he had his cock in my pussy, but it was too tight to slide.
Bending far over me, he grabbed at my pussy. I flung my knees apart and let him maul my labia with both hands. A strange, new kind of lust was devouring me. I had an intoxicating sense of power with his cock all the way in, as it was, and flashes of wild delight fired my cunt. He forced fingers into my cuntmouth and caught my clitoris between his thumbs. An exquisite path of sensation stretched from my throat to my cunt and I gulped at him.
For the third time, my belly knotted in orgasmic contractions. But this time I knew I wasn't alone.
The underside of his cock jerked against my upper lip and ropes of cum washed into my throat. The thick eruption didn't have far to go. I forced it into my stomach as fast as it welled into me. My cuntmouth squeezed his fingers in hard, sudden gulps and I watched his balls jerk up and down as he drained himself. The involuntary swallowing milked his cock, even after the buried instrument started to soften, and he continued to shoot jism. He muttered to himself, his voice carrying a note of alarm.
"Jesus Christ! Never had it like this! Can't keep on forever!"
His belly appeared to be churning and his hips shook fiercely. He tugged backward, his shriveling cock pulling gradually out of my throat. I forced my jaws apart and let him extract his cockhead, then sighed and swallowed again. As if he were using the last of his strength, he helped me onto the bed and staggered to his clothes.
He recovered much faster than I did. He'd only come once, while I'd made it three times. I was still lying motionless, only half conscious, when he'd finished dressing. He knelt on the edge of the bed and ran his hands over my nakedness.
"Pretty damn fine body, love. You were designed for fucking."
I was too exhausted even to grunt. He really did paw me! He kept turning me this way and that, rearranging my arms and legs to emphasize different parts of my body and handling everything I had. I was too tired to get hot again, but there was still enough tension left to keep me tingling.
"Please!" I finally managed to whisper. "Get out of here before Corky catches you!"
"Aw, shit! That dumb gorilla doesn't worry me.
"You're making a mistake."
"Sure, sure." He squeezed both my tits as if he owned them. "You know what's good for him, you'll come running if you ever hear me whistle."
"Oh, really! You can't be serious!"
"You do love him, don't you?"
"Of course! But nothing would be more fun than to watch you try to take him."
"Hmph! Well, don't say I didn't warn you. And you might keep it in mind somebody gave you another kind of warning, too."
At least my head didn't hurt; he'd provided an excellent counter-irritant. "Okay, somebody tried to warn us. Now, get the hell out of here!"
He grunted, swatted my ass familiarly, and left. With the last of my tension melting away, I didn't have the energy to move. I shut my eyes and drifted into the sleep I had wanted in the first place.
CHAPTER FOUR
I awakened suddenly, sensing danger but unable to identify its source, It took several seconds to orient myself, and I stumbled around the room trying to recall where I was. Swaying drapes brought the events of the morning back with a rush, and I jerked them aside to find the window standing open. Out of curiosity, certain Len had been the one who had sapped me, I leaned out to see whether a person could have used the window to enter or escape.
A narrow balcony ran along the side of the building, providing a connecting path for all the windows on that side. The sun beat hotly against the building, and I remembered Corky's mentioning we faced south. Without a breath of air stirring, I found myself perspiring almost at once and became acutely aware of my nakedness, fully exposed where I stood. As I backed into the room and let the drapes shut out the sunlight, some minor discrepancy tugged at my consciousness. I tried to force it into the open, staring unseeing at the drapes. They swayed slowly, settling into place and soon becoming motionless. That's when it hit me. They had been swaying a few moments earlier, before I had touched them! In the absence of the slightest breeze, something else had disturbed them!
A chill of uneasiness made me shiver and reach for my clothes. That something could have been one of two things. Either somebody had gone in or out through the window, or somebody had been on the balcony and deliberately spied on me. I laughed uncomfortably; whoever had stirred the drapes had gotten a view that had left damn little to the imagination. The way the people on this floor regarded sex, I could almost be certain it had been a woman. Any one of the men would have been on top of me by now.
A lot of things went through my mind, then, none of them real pleasant. How come anybody would be spying? Or worse than that, how come anybody would be sneaking into our bedroom through the window? How come Corky hadn't showed up yet? And what if Tom "had come back from the swimming pool while I was sprawled out on the bed sleeping off that screwing bare-ass naked? Just how much of that business with Len Conn was I going to tell Corky?
I decided the first thing to do was find Corky. He'd had plenty of time to finish his interview with Eadie, even if he'd had to pump information out of her with his cock. I finished dressing and reached for my purse. Alarm bells jangled in my head when I realized it was wide open. Quickly, I examined the contents. My revolver was missing--a snub-nosed thirty-eight that had more than once eased me out of a sticky situation. I didn't anticipate needing it here, but the fact it had been stolen shook me severely; maybe it was going to be important to me after all!
I found Corky at the pool. He was sound asleep on the lounge where I'd left him, and the sun had moved around to where its rays were turning him a bright pink. I laid my hand on his shoulder and woke him, thankful it was just his face and a vee at his throat that was exposed to sunburn.
He surged upright, alert and clear-headed. "Uh! Honey! How long was I asleep?"
"I don't know. When did you conk out?" We decided it had been about an hour. "Figured you needed a rest," he remarked. "Had a drink and watched Tom for a while." He gave me that crooked grin I get so fluttery over. "Y'know, that kid's getting a grown-up eye!"
"For the broads, you mean?"
"Yeah! Discriminating, too! He eyes the same ones I would if I were young and single."
"Oh, come on! The same ones you drool over anyhow!"
"Okay, okay." He laughed and jerked me onto his lap.
"Honey! Please! Corky, not that! Everybody's turning around!"
I saw it was going to take more than a protest to turn him off. "Honey, somebody swiped my thirty-eight!"
"What!" He swung me to my feet and scrambled off the lounge.
"Right out of my purse! While I was asleep!"
"Christ! Came into our rooms?" He scowled. "Take anything else?"
"I'm not sure. Nothing else was missing from my purse, but--"
"Come on!"
In the elevator, I remembered I hadn't seen Tom. "Hey, where did Tom go?"
"Hell, I don't know. Probably followed one of those broads into the coffee shop. He's big enough to take care of himself."
"And any one of those broads," I reminded him. "That's what I'm thinking about!"
He chuckled. "He's going to get around to it sooner or later. No use sweating it."
"But Corky! At fifteen?"
"What the hell? Gotta admit, there's a better class here than some places he might try it out."
"Oh, you!"
Corky's revolver was right where he'd hidden it, spring holster and all. But when we checked our drawers, they showed evidence of having been searched.
"Whoever it was did a neater job than in the Murdocks' bedroom. You must have been sleeping pretty soundly!"
"Well, what with a lump on my head and--"
"Lump on the head! Hey, let's have it, baby."
We went to the living room, fixed drinks, and settled comfortably. Then I told him about getting slugged. I was pretty careful about Len's part in it.
"I don't know what he came in for; I think he was probably the one who hit me in the first place. But when I came to, he'd gotten me onto the bed and was using a wet cloth to bring me around."
"The son of a bitch." Corky sounded angry, but he wasn't killing mad yet. "Most likely hinting to us he didn't appreciate our being so nosy. So what happened?"
"Well, like I said, I'd just come from the shower and-" He snorted. "Oh, yeah. So you didn't have anything on and one thing led to another." He grinned, and I was thankful we'd developed such a comfortable live-and-let-live marriage. He continued. "So then you had to sleep off all that screwing. No wonder you slept through the search. Come to think of it, that makes it look like it was a woman."
"That's what I thought." I smiled with a touch of malice. "At least, I hope so!"
"You'd really be pissed if it was a guy and he didn't make a try at you." He gave me a dirty laugh, then sobered. "We've got a job now, even if we don't take the one Murdock offered. We've got to locate that thirty-eight!"
"What about Eadie? Find out anything?"
"She's cool. Hell of a lot more savvy than she lets on. Damn good gate-crasher, too."
"Here on her own?"
"I'm sure of it. Played off one against the other so Len thought the Murdocks brought her and they thought he did. Smooth!"
"Her looks and that figure had a lot to do with it."
He chuckled. "Yeah. And she's got the movement to back them up. Bet she's the one who got away with that diamond. And she'll be trying for the rest of them."
"Think she's got my gun?"
"Likely. Look, it's time we had a talk with Jerry and Brenda."
"You plan on warning them?"
"Let's play it by ear. That stone they've got might make good bait. If they start worrying about it we could have a problem."
I was sure, then, we were going to take the job for the Murdocks.
"Corky... that gun. Either somebody's expecting to need one or they want to be sure I won't use it."
He nodded. "The way they went through things, it looks like they were after mine, too. Like they don't want us doing any shooting."
"Maybe it was Carol. Maybe she's got the idea we might have swiped that diamond."
"I doubt it. They know where we were last night."
"Where I was. What about you?"
He chuckled, "Carol was in the living room when Eadie took off. Hell, I don't know; she could think Eadie and I worked together, I suppose."
We'd gotten as far as we could by guessing. We needed more facts. The Simones were in the lounge at the west end of our floor. They'd made themselves comfortable and were apparently enjoying the view of the bay. We'd had no chance to visit with them yet, and they seemed delighted when we joined them.
"Emmett and Carol bring you two to keep an eye on their diamonds?" asked Jerry the minute we sat down.
Corky did a good job of acting. "What diamonds? We're just guests." He leered at Brenda. "Damn white of Em and Carol, too!"
She smiled and preened a little; Corky has that kind of effect on women. But Jerry wasn't to be put off.
"Come on, Corky, Sure, you two add spice to a swap, but that's not all you're here for."
"Diamonds. Tell me about them, Jerry." Corky turned reluctantly away from Brenda.
It seemed obvious Jerry couldn't decide whether to believe Corky or not. He hesitated, then drew a deep breath and leaned forward.
"Okay. Let's pretend you don't know anything about them. I'm talking about the Brighton Diamonds--the Smoky Quads. A few months back we spent some time in Europe with Em and Carol." He went on to tell us about the contact in Berne and the man's desperation. "He needed cash so bad he'd made up his mind to sell two of the stones."
I had difficulty avoiding a startled reaction. Fortunately, Corky started acting like a detective--you know, like they do on TV--and Jerry ate it up. Dropping his casual air, Corky turned businesslike.
"Wait a minute, Jerry. You're talking about having a piece of the Brighton Diamonds?"
"Right."
"You and the Murdocks bought two of them in Berne?"
"That's right." Then Jerry shook his head. "No! That was supposed to be the deal, but it didn't work that way."
"Oh! You got more than two?"
"Well, this guy contacted Emmett, see. And Emmett asked if we wanted in on the deal. Well! Who's going to turn down a chance like that? Only the Murdocks screwed us. I mean, they bought three instead of one. Didn't even give us a chance to go for another one."
Corky shrugged. "Probably figured they had the lion's share coming, since the guy had contacted them to start with."
"Like hell! Emmett turned over the negotiations for the two he told us about to us! Some kind of static about him being too well known around town. He and Carol hit there about once a year, you know."
"Hmm. So you arranged the purchase."
"For two. Emmett must have gone ahead dickering for the other two behind my back."
"How do you know they got three?"
Jerry and Brenda exchanged glances before Jerry replied.
"Well... let's just say we found out. So it seems likely they got you out here to ride shotgun."
Corky shook his head. "Apparently not. They haven't asked us to."
Brenda entered the conversation, her voice light and musical. "That Eadie person... have you known her long?" she asked. "She's so attractive, in an athletic sort of way."
"Huh?" Even Corky had been caught off guard.
"Didn't she come with you?" she demanded. "We thought... " I started laughing and Corky joined me in a minute.
"That girl's got one hell of a lot of gall," he commented. "Bet she's interested in diamonds."
"How would she know?" Jerry sounded worried, his voice climbing fast. "Christ! People have gotten killed over those stones!"
"I've heard. Hey, Jerry, are they as big as the stories say?"
Jerry grunted. "Are a bull's nuts? Come on, we'll show you!"
We went to their suite and Jerry left us in the living room with Brenda while he disappeared into their bedroom. In a moment, he was back with one of the diamonds in his hand. It was the most striking gem I had ever seen. It was smoky, all right. And Jerry had been right about the size, too. It was easily as big as a bull's testicle, although I'd have been more likely to say it was the size of a small pear, because of its shape.
Corky pulled out a clean handkerchief when Jerry held the stone out to him. When the diamond lay on the white cloth, the smoky tint was even more pronounced. But there were fantastic flashes of light at the slightest movement. I tried to imagine what a display it must have been with four of those things hanging on a pair of full, naked breasts.
Corky whistled softly. "Jesus, what a stone!" Then, without looking up, "You don't handle diamonds with bare hands, Jerry. Leaves a residue that dulls them."
"I thought that was with pearls!"
"Well, the acid eats into the surface of pearls. But the oils dull the surface on diamonds, and you don't want to be washing one like this all the time." He returned the stone to Jerry, still on the handkerchief, and Jerry started back to the bedroom with it.
"Let me get you a drink," offered Brenda, going toward the corner bar. Rounding the end, she stopped abruptly. Her eyes widened and she thrust the back of her hand against her mouth. "Jerry! Jerry!"
A body! I thought.
Corky leaped to her side and looked behind the bar. He didn't get the sick expression a body produces, but he did look startled.
"What the hell!" he exclaimed.
I got to them just before Jerry. I had a brief glimpse of bottles and glasses all over the floor and bare shelves under the bar, but Jerry's gasp made me look up in time to catch the stricken glance he and Brenda exchanged. Not that it was that brief a glance. They stared at each other, their faces working and their eyes wild. They might as well have hung out a neon sign. They'd had something hidden in the bar and somebody had found it.
"How... how come... " Jerry gulped.
Brenda whispered. "Jerry! Just the bar!"
"The Murdocks! Those Goddamn Murdocks!" He was rapidly turning purple.
Corky had dropped to his hands and knees and was picking stuff up and putting it back on the shelves. He hadn't once looked up at the other two. "What about the Murdocks?" he asked, voice muffled.
"We were talking about hiding things once," muttered Jerry. "I said something about the bar being a pretty good place. Son of a bitch!"
"Good thing you didn't have that diamond out here," remarked Corky.
The way Jerry jumped, I saw the whole scene in a flash. Knowing I was going to laugh, I bolted from the suite. Outside in the corridor, I clutched at my mouth to stifle my giggles and ran for our suite. Jerry and Brenda had stolen one of the jewels from Carol and Em--the one from under the waste basket. Smart enough not to hide it with their own, they'd wound up with one under the bar and the other someplace else. The Murdocks had decided not to wait for Corky and me to make up our minds and had swiped the one Brenda and Jerry had put under the bar. Everything was back where it had started, now, and poor Jerry couldn't even tell Corky what had been taken!
It wasn't all that funny, of course, as Corky pointed out when he joined me. He didn't like being offered a job and having his prospective client continue working on the case while we were weighing our decision. It was a matter of ethics.
"They don't need us, now," he commented. "No reason to hang around, except to get your gun back. But I'm going to have a word with Emmett."
On the way to the Murdock suite, we passed Len's door. It was open, and I glanced in.
"Corky! Wait!"
"Huh? What's-- Jesus!" He sprang past me into Len's room.
A body lay face down on the floor, and when I followed Corky inside I recognized Len. Corky put his fingers to Len's throat to feel for a pulse.
"Strong pulse," he muttered. "Christ! Look at the back of his head!"
Even through the thick, blue-black hair, I could see the swelling. When I looked closer, I realized there was blood, as well. I winced. Len had done a professional job on me--assuming it was he who had slugged me--but whoever had hit him had used no finesse at all. He was going to have one hell of a headache when he woke up He might even find his memory scrambled for a while.
Corky sighed and got to his feet. "I'll get a wet rag."
I started to examine the lump with my fingertips and Len groaned and stirred.
"Oooh!" He started to turn his head, but winced and let out a real grunt of pain. "Ouch! Oh, shit!"
"Just lie still for a minute! Take it easy!"
"That you, Mona?" He didn't even open his eyes.
"Yes. Take it easy."
"Jesus! Didn't know you were that pissed off! Oooh!"
"Oh, shut up! I didn't do it!"
Groaning the whole time, he rolled onto his side and peered at me through one half-open eye. He grinned through his agony. "Figure on raping me?"
"You better shut up. Here comes Corky with a wet rag."
"Uh. What the hell did you hit me with?"
"I tell you, I didn't do it!"
"Corky?"
Corky knelt and held the cold cloth to the lump. "Conn, when I do come after you I won't bother hitting you from behind." I knew he meant it.
I almost sympathized with Len. Corky wasn't being at all gentle. But I looked around the room and realized someone had been hunting for something.
"Did you have anything hidden in here?" I asked.
He groaned again. "Don't remind me! I remember coming in. Shit, what a mess! Ow! Take it easy, Shelton!" He pushed Corky's hand away and struggled to sit up. With a great shudder, he braced himself with stiff arms and let his head hang, chin resting on chest.
In a moment, he shook his head and raised it. He blinked and focused his eyes with an effort. "Son of a bitch could have killed me that way!"
"No idea who did it," remarked Corky.
"Not if you didn't. Look at this Goddamn room!"
Corky grunted. "Got what you had coming, I guess. Any idea what they were after?"
"Wouldn't tell you if I did. Go away and let me alone!" Len groaned again and staggered to his feet. "No! Pour me about four fingers of Scotch first. Okay?"
"Any idea what time you came in here?" asked Corky as I went to the bar.
"Yeah. About eleven-thirty."
My watch showed one-thirty. I looked up from it to see the same kind of mess I'd seen behind Brenda and Jerry's bar. Picking out a half-full bottle of Scotch and a tumbler, I poured Len's drink.
"Want ice in it, Len?" I asked. "Of course!"
There wasn't much ice. The intruder had even scooped most of that out. But there were a few cubes left, and I dropped two into the glass.
"You hide things under the bar, Len?" I took the drink to him.
He took a deep gulp and shook his head, wincing at the movement. "Naw! That's Simone's trick, the stupid shit."
"Huh?" Corky stared.
"Yeah. Somebody made a crack about that necklace the Ferris broad was wearing last night and Simone told her to hide it under the bar."
I hadn't heard that, but I'd been whispering to Emmett, so maybe it wasn't surprising.
"You don't know what they were after?" Corky persisted.
"I didn't say that. I said I wouldn't tell you if I did know."
"Man, you were out for two hours! There's somebody who doesn't care whether you're alive or not! I'd think-"
"Oh, fuck it, Shelton! Whoever you're working for, it's not me! Why should I tell you anything?"
"Fact is, we're not working for anybody yet. It just bugs me when something like this happens and I don't know why."
"No wonder you're an investigator. Too damn curious to do anything else. Anyhow, you're not going to stick your nose into this."
"Come on, Corky. Let's go. He's got a headache for company."
We left Len groaning and nursing his drink. It was satisfying to know how the mess in that room was contributing to his misery.
We didn't go to the Murdocks right away. Corky decided he needed to make some inquiries at the main desk.
"Conn isn't going to be bugging you right away," he remarked. "Why don't you wait up here for me? Just stay alert; I'd hate to find you with a scalp like his."
I walked to the elevator with him, then started back to our suite. There was some noise coming from Eadie's room; she evidently had one of the men in there, judging from the pleasure in the voices. And I'd gotten clear into our suite before I realized it had been Tom's voice.
CHAPTER FIVE
I wasn't sure which one I was angrier at--Tom or Eadie Ferris. The kind of noises I'd heard, they weren't playing cribbage or scrabble. But I knew my son well enough to know he hadn't been lured into her apartment all wide-eyed and innocent. As Corky had said, the boy had already developed a discriminating eye, and I was uncomfortably certain he had a man's appetite to go with it. I'd gotten used to the tent his bedclothes made in the morning when I went in to awaken him. And I knew he took advantage of every opportunity to spy on me when I was undressed. I hadn't made an issue of it--that might simply aggravate it--but I had tried to be extra careful. There had been that one time when I'd glanced across into the mirror and seen his reflection. If he hadn't been imagining himself putting it to me, I'd never seen the expression on a man's face!
I was puzzled as to what I ought to do right now. Making like an outraged, overprotective mother would be disastrous. If he really was getting his first piece, there wasn't a damn thing I could do! In fact, Eadie was probably just the kind of woman a kid ought to start with--great figure, beauty-contest face, and an unspoiled appetite for sex. On the other hand, she probably had no idea how sensitive fifteen-year-old boys are; she might make some kind of comment that would leave a hell of a scar.
What it boiled down to was, I couldn't do anything, but I had too much of the mother instinct to do nothing. I had to know what was happening to my baby! I didn't even ask myself if I might be doing wrong. I slipped onto the balcony and crept along the wall to Eadie's suite, pausing at each window on the way to be sure I wouldn't be seen.
Eadie's windows were open and her drapes were closed, as I'd expected. I listened for a time, decided nobody was paying any attention to the drapes, and stepped inside. I stayed behind the drapes, but moved to the side until I reached one end, where no one could see me from outside. Cautiously, I peeked around the end of the drape.
Things hadn't gotten nearly as far as I'd thought. If I'd knocked at the door instead of coming along the balcony, they could have let me in without any problem. But they were too far for me to make it back around. Tom was sprawled on the couch, sort of backed against one end, and Eadie was halfway lying on him. As nearly as I could tell, she was giving him a course in French kissing. He was swallowing convulsively, and they both had their faces contorted as if they were shoving their tongues back and forth from one mouth to the other. I knew they'd been away from the pool for at least three hours, but both were in their bathing suits. That meant either they'd gone their separate ways for quite a while, or they'd only come up to her suite within the last little while.
Eadie's suit was a bikini. I'd been impressed earlier with how little the top did toward covering those mouthwatering globes of hers, but the way she was rubbing her tits on Tom's chest, one boob had already popped into the open. The bottom of her suit wasn't meant to hide anything. It was a bright patch that did a poor imitation, stretching over most of her pubic hair and about half her ass crack. But wisps of dark, auburn hair curled over the top when she was standing, and others showed at each side of her crotch now, as she kept one leg extended along Tom's and let the other hang off the couch. Round chain links tugged at the corners of the patch and bit into the fullness of her hips, and they were connected at the halfway point simply by hooks.
Even as I took in the scene, she did a sort of fluid twist and her bra slid down to her waist. Tom's eyes got round and he squirmed under the soft, spreading mounds. Eadie pulled away from the kiss, grinned down on him, and wiggled along his browned young torso.
"Wow!" exclaimed Tom. "Jeez, Eadie!"
She laughed, her voice tinkling like a string of bells. "What's the matter, Tom?"
"Jeez, what pretty tits!"
She propped herself up, lifting her boobs and letting them dangle ponderously before his face. "You really like them, sweetie?"
"Cripes! They'd smother a baby!"
She giggled and one tit swung across Tom's nose, the nipple brushing hesitantly as if it were sticky. I realized they were both sweating heavily--Eadie and my son, I mean--and knew the nipple was clinging as it went across. He had one hand on the small of her back, but he drew the other under her and felt of one breast with his fingertips. She pressed her chin against her chest, watching, and moved until her other boob hung against my son's lips.
With an expression of doubt, as if he thought she might jerk away, he opened his mouth and caught the nipple between his lips. I saw what Corky had meant when he'd mentioned how hot she was. Her face clouded. A frown of intense feeling appeared and her lips pouted while she clenched her teeth and gave a soft moan.
"Oh, my, Tommy! Oh, my, yes! Whew!"
He nuzzled at the tit and rolled it experimentally between his lips. Even where I was, I could see how velvety the oversized lump was, and I could imagine the warmth and firmness he was feeling in it. His confidence appeared to strengthen with her obvious pleasure. He pulled the nipple fully into his mouth, his lips pressing into her aureole, and began to suck.
I saw her muscles ripple and her knuckles whiten as she drew in her breath with a hissing sound. Her asscheeks tightened and her hips drove downward to crush her belly against Tom's. His reaction left nothing to be desired, regardless of what it did to me to watch it. He slid his hand onto her ass and got hold of one taut cheek. He squeezed hard, and his own hips began to jerk. With a greedy gulp, he got a great mouthful of her boob between his teeth and sucked.
Eadie seemed to have forgotten her provocative act. She was getting what she wanted and must have been content to let things develop without guidance. She tipped her head back and stared open-mouthed at the wall, auburn hair tumbling over her shoulders and into Tom's face. She was grinding her hips, and she jerked her knee up and sideways so it dug into the back of the couch. Astride Tom, she crushed her twat onto the bulging ridge of his hard-on, making the most of it through her own bikini and his suit.
Tom clearly knew what was happening. His fingers went to the chains across her hips and unfastened the hooks without hesitation. When he caught one and tugged, Eadie raised herself long enough to let him pull the wisp of a garment free, then mashed herself on his cock again. She was twisting her head from side to side and writhing continuously, as turned on as anyone I'd ever seen.
Tom looked distressed. He kept chewing at that enormous tit, but his legs tightened, and he drew one knee up, his thigh lifting Eadie's and easing the pressure she was putting on his cock. I smothered a giggle as I realized he must be coming too close to orgasm to trust himself. And it was no surprise when he pushed her off.
It seemed to surprise her. She grabbed at him and tried to recapture their contact, protesting plaintively. "Tommy, sweetie! Why? Don't push me away, sweetie! Not now!"
Tom panted. "Give me a second, huh? Jeez, I'm going to go off like a rocket!"
She gulped a deep breath and shuddered, then stood and fumbled at the dangling bikini bra. "God, sweetie! Get out of that bathing suit! Quick!"
He surged to his feet beside her, his hard-on a great, heavy bulge in the front of the suit. Fiercely, he thrust the suit off his hips and down his thighs, his pecker rigid and fat, an angry red and jerking as if he were already coming. As he kicked the suit off, Eadie whirled and grabbed him. He twisted to face her, his cock pinned between them and her boobs mashed against his chest.
For a second, they seemed to be wrestling. Only when he threw Eadie onto her back on the couch and she laughed in surrender did I realize she'd intended to get on top. But she flung her knees apart and drew them up, letting Tom drop between her tanned, rounded thighs. His cockhead butted against the mass of pubic hair and her butt rose and rotated. Her labia swelled pink and glistening, puffy with her excitement and rolled back to expose the darkly gaping mouth of her cunt. She was coated with thick wetness and her cuntmouth winked rhythmically.
With his inexperience, Tom's movements contributed little to their efforts. But Eadie seemed to have educated hips. Her pussy rotated upward and captured the bulbous young cockhead, the rim of her cunt grasping the blunt nose before she dropped back. Corded muscles stood out at Tom's throat and his eyes took on a glazed appearance.
"You... you ready?" he asked eagerly.
"Christ, yes, sweetie! Ram it home!"
His hips slammed forward and the thick, purple knob wedged her open and vanished. The veined white shaft plunged smoothly out of sight and his groin smashed against the red hair of her cunt.
"Ahhhh!" she sighed gustily. "Now, fuck, sweetie! Fuck with all you've got!"
He blasted her. Young and vigorous, he seemed to let instinct govern his movements. His hips snapped viciously, jerking his shaft back, then pounding it in with a force that jarred her whole body. She showed no sign of objecting. Her heels lodged behind his hard asscheeks and jerked with each of his thrusts, while her own hips leaped to meet him. She gripped his upper arms, her nails digging into the firm flesh and drawing thin trickles of blood.
I couldn't make out any evidence of conscious awareness in my son's manner. It looked like he had lost himself in his sensations and was functioning entirely on the basis of sexual drive. His body was a beautiful, violent machine, driving his cock like a meaty piston in the steaming maw of her cunt. And Eadie's face was radiant with joy; she seemed to be experiencing a whole new kind of intensity in his savage fucking.
Tom uttered a strangled, animal cry and ground his groin against her, his pumping abruptly giving way to a convulsive kind of sustained push. Eadie jerked her legs, locking her ankles behind him and clamping him in the fierce hug of her thighs.
"Ah! Mmp! Unnnhhh!" Her exclamations were hard and explosive.
"ARGHHH!" Tom roared, his cry one of bestial gratification rather than human emotion.
Abruptly, his quivering, ridged tendons loosened and he collapsed into her arms. She cradled him, her legs still clutching savagely and her hips grinding in small, hard circles under him. I saw alarm in Tom's expression and knew her orgasm had come to him as a surprise. I wondered if the powerful contractions of her cunt on his softening pecker were hurting him or merely coming as an unexpected pleasure.
At last, Eadie's rigidity eased and she began to relax. But she continued to hold Tom, letting his weight crush her while their perspiration trickled off her.
"My God, sweetie!" Eadie's voice sounded strained; Tom was crushing her. "Nobody ever fucked me that hard before!"
"Huh? Really?"
"Was it good, Tom? Was I good?" - "Jeez, Eadie! You're super! I didn't know it was that good!"
"Tommy! Tommy, you've got to be kidding! You were a virgin?"
Tom appeared to tense. "Couldn't you tell?"
"Well... well, I really wasn't thinking about that. I mean... Tommy, how old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"Oh, my gawd! Tommy, I didn't know! I thought you were probably seventeen or eighteen! Oh, my poor baby!"
"What's wrong?"
I could tell he was getting upset. He wasn't at all sure what her problem was, nor was I. Age didn't seem all that important, the way he'd banged her. But she showed signs of real distress. She twisted out from under him, rolling him against the back of the couch, and scrambled off his cock and into a sitting position beside him. Leaning over him, she caressed his temple with her fingertips and crooned to him.
"Oh, sweetie! Sweetie! I hope I didn't ruin everything for you! Oh, Tommy, I'm so sorry!"
"Didn't you like it after all?"
"Tommy, you fuck beautifully! But a boy ought to have a couple of years working for it before he gets it that easily!"
"Huh?"
She explained softly, persuasively, like a history teacher. "A lot of girls don't know how much they want to fuck! They let a guy do a lot of feeling around, but when he gets where they think he's far enough, they shut him off. That didn't happen with us. And you could get hurt terribly if you expected them all to be as eager as I was!"
She didn't seem to realize she was fingering his limp cock all the time she was talking. The involuntary jerks of his belly muscles showed he damn well realized it. But he didn't appear to follow her logic; there was considerable confusion evident in his expression.
Eadie bent close and stared into his eyes. "You see what I'm trying to say, sweetie?"
"Well... " He let a wrinkle of doubt settle between his eyebrows. "Eadie?"
"Hmm?"
"Was it fun, Eadie?"
"Of course it was! Silly boy!"
His cock began to harden and grow in her hand. "Hey, Eadie, want to fuck again?"
She jerked as if he'd prodded her with an electrode. "Ooh, sweetie! Did you have to ask like that?"
"Want to?"
She shuddered violently and laid her boobs against him, her mouth covering his in a greedy kiss. When she straightened, her eyes were shining.
"For God's sake, you impatient thing, you! Yes! Yes, I want to fuck again!"
He caught her by the shoulders and wolfed at her lips. She slid off the couch, kneeling before it and rubbing her tits on his arm while she fondled his dick. When he stopped gulping at her mouth, she mumbled, "My gawd, Tommy! You're all peter and mouth!"
"And hands," he muttered, grabbing at her twat.
Her knees slid apart and she settled onto the grubbing fingers. I held my breath and squirmed when she began to nibble at the underside of his cock. Halfway across the room from me though they were, the white marks were visible on the reddened shaft as her teeth slid over yielding, pulpy flesh. She held his cock like an ear of corn, one palm cradling the bulky cockhead and the first finger and thumb of her other hand encircling the swollen base.
Tom grinned like an idiot. His arm hung off the couch while he worked his hand in the thick wetness at her pussy. His other hand worked as diligently at her boobs, twisting her nipples and squeezing the great globes behind them. I was reminded of his infancy and the delight he had shown over new toys. He'd never get another toy with as many controls and more variable responses than the one he was playing with now.
His hard-on continued swelling; Eadie's thumb and forefinger no longer met as they held it. She had stopped nibbling and began tenderly licking the full, straight ridges. Tom stopped watching her, his eyes taking on a faraway look. His hands slowed and squeezed harder.
"Jeez, Eadie! Jeez, that feels funny!"
"It's different, isn't it, sweetie."
"God, yes! Feels like he's going to split right down the middle!"
"Know what? That's what I thought when you stuck him in me... that I was going to split right down the middle!"
"Aw, c'mon! Not really."
She laughed softly and started caressing his cockhead with her tongue. Either he was growing accustomed to the new sensations or his cockhead generated different ones than his shaft had. His face grew animated at her change of attack and he renewed his vigorous fumbling at her twat. Her butt swung in jerky circles and she panted loudly. Puckering her lips, she sucked at his cockhead the way a child does an ice cream cone. But the muscles along her back and thighs were writhing and I knew she wasn't going to stay on the floor much longer.
When she started to rise, lifting one knee and drawing her foot close to the couch, Tom's fingers plunged into her cunt. She groaned heavily and a startled expression twisted his face, as if he hadn't expected the wholesale penetration. She slammed her belly forward against the edge of the couch and Tom lifted, his fingers buried to the knuckles. He lifted her until her feet left the floor, and she hung quivering on his hand, body erect, thighs clamped on his upright arm, and head thrown back.
"Jesus!" she cried in a strained voice. "Jesus, sweetie! Let me down before I commme!" A fierce tremor shook her.
Tom lowered her. She swung one leg across him and twisted to face him, kneeling astride his hips. He pulled his hand free and seized her thighs. While she held his cock vertically poised with her hand, she settled her pussy over the waiting cockhead. For a moment, she hesitated, her face registering desire and a hint of mischief. Tom grinned back at her.
"Hey! This is pretty good!" he exclaimed.
"Yes!" Her reply was a strident whisper.
"Good-good!"
She inched forward until her knees rested against the hollow of his waist. Her thighs trembled with strain. Her boobs quivered, the nipples dancing until they blurred.
"God!" she whispered. "Oh, God! This is what I wanted to do!" But she still hesitated.
I knew what she was steeling herself for. She was letting her cuntmouth settle onto that fat cockhead, and when she had engulfed the flared shoulders she was going to drop. Her thighs were going to go loose and her whole weight was going to drop. She was going to impale herself on that magnificent shaft, letting the head plow brutally its full length in her. Without giving her organs a chance to slide gently aside, she was going to blow them apart with the immovable bulk of Tom's huge cock.
Teeth clenched and eyes wide, she let herself go. Down around the awesome pole she plunged, the charged tissues around her cunt striking Tom's groin with a wet "smack"! Generous as her proportions were, she had the inward curved belly of a teen-ager, and I could see the upward rush of the lump Tom's dick raised through the taut flesh.
The blow wrenched a muffled cry from her. "Unnp!" Then, "Ahhhhh! Ooh, sweetie! God!"
Tom's fingers tightened. His shoulders jerked at the impact and he looked scared. "Jeez, did we tear anything?"
"No! Christ, no! Oh, he feels so good up there!"
Tom's hips jerked and Eadie bounced. She leaned over my son, the heels of her hands braced on his ribs, and her butt began to swing sharply up and down. I could see his cock, its shaft alternately exposed and engulfed, while the gleaming, bloodshot lips of her pussy flashed along it. Her hair floated in a churning cloud about her face. Her boobs swung massively, jerking at each end of the swing. Her belly was crossed with tight rolls as the muscles twisted, and her thighs pumped.
Rapidly approaching a frenzy, Tom snapped his hips upward to meet each of her downward plunges. He stabbed her with his cock as if it were a knight's lance. Their flesh met with loud cracks and the lush, red-brown hair on her pussy tangled with the black ringlets around the base of his cock. His scrotum tightened and pulled his balls close to his dick, and he thrust his thighs apart to prevent getting the precious stones crushed.
"Tommy! Tommeee!" She thrust herself erect and jerked her hips backward and forward. His cock levered from front to back, the head surely bumping against her spine and then against her abdominal wall.
She sagged sideways and Tom rolled onto her thigh, his cock still deeply buried in her. She clung to him while he blasted at her.
"Oh, Christ, sweetie! Can you keep from coming for a minute?" she asked frantically.
"I think so, Eadie," he puffed. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing! I want to try something! I don't know... " He let her pull herself off his cock and stumble to her feet.
"It's a sort of tumbling exercise," she told him, her lips stiff. "Always wanted to see if I could get fucked this way."
She knelt at the end of the couch, knees half buried in the seat cushion, ass touching the arm. Slowly, she bent herself backward until she was arched over the arm, her legs bent double and her toes between the seat cushion and the arm. Her upper torso hung toward the floor, her gleaming hair spread on the carpet and her arms outflung.
Her knees were widely parted and her thighs looked board hard.
"Sweetie! Sweetie, can you fuck me this way?"
Tom approached her awkwardly, guiding his cock with one hand. He nudged his cockhead against the half-hidden cuntmouth and continued to press forward over her.
Tom sweated and shoved. I knew he wouldn't get his whole dong into her, but he'd get enough to satisfy both of them. And the boniness of his pelvic arch would ride on her clit.
"Jesus, Tommy! Oooh, yesss! Fuck meee!"
He surged back and forth on the taut, high mound of her belly. Her tits jounced and her head swung. I imagined I could hear their sweaty skin squeak as his rasped back and forth over hers. His ass flashed in the subdued light. Eadie made strangling sounds and her eyes widened so far they appeared to bulge.
"Pull... me... up!" she gasped. "Keep your... dick... in... but pull... me up! Quick!"
He braced himself, forearm on the arm of the couch, and slid his other hand down her back. Levering his arm, he swung her head and shoulders out and up until she was horizontal. His face flushed a deep red as he continued to raise her, but she grabbed at him and helped right herself.
"My gawd, sweetie! Thought I'd die! Brrr!"
She recovered fast, squirming to free her legs and wrap them around my son. She jerked her butt back and forth, then, renewing the forceful fucking as if nothing had happened.
Tom shuddered. He clutched at her asscheeks, fingertips dipping into her crack. With savage tugs, he reinforced her pumping. He gave the impression of caring nothing for the position, so long as his cock was being stroked in that warm, soft cavity.
Their rhythm accelerated and their panting turned to labored gasps. My own body ached from the sympathetic writhing of its muscles and I dimly recognized I was digging at my inflamed clitoris with one hand. Tom turned gradually so Eadie's back was toward the back of the couch. I saw his back muscles begin a wild, secondary flutter and knew he was on the verge of another climax.
He rammed Eadie's butt against the back of the couch and trapped it, then bored against her while her legs splayed and her feet beat a tattoo on the seat cushion. She cried out in a guttural shriek, all her movements settling into the abrupt, spaced, wrenching spasms of orgasm. Tom's asscheeks clamped together and twitched fiercely. I could practically smell the hot-spurting cum as it spewed into her belly.
"Ahhh, Tommy!"
He grunted, and clutched her to him.
At last her legs quit trembling and hung quietly, extended and widespread, but limp. Tom leaned against her, the picture of exhaustion. He moaned happily.
"Jeez, Eadie! Oh, jeez, that's hard work!"
She put her arms around his shoulders and nipped his neck "More work than it's worth, sweetie?" she asked breathlessly.
"Hell, no! I mean... 'scuse me, Eadie... I mean, of course it isn't! Sure wears a guy down, though!"
"Wears a woman down, too, sweetie. 'Specially when the guy fucks as ferociously as you! I bet my pussy's black and blue for a week!"
"Aw, you don't mean that, do you?"
"I guess not. You didn't hurt me, anyway. But I feel numb as hell! We really did pound each other!"
A little later, she spoke again. "Sweetie?"
"Huh?"
"Suppose we could sort of slide down so I can lie on you without losing your peter?"
"Maybe."
They did, moving carefully and with a lot of happy giggles. Seeing her plump buttocks humped above Tom's lean hips brought it home to me again that I'd just watched my son get his first real fucking. As well as I could judge, nothing about the experience had threatened his future enjoyment of sex. He would lay women who lacked Eadie's enthusiasm and skill, but I was ready to bet he would arouse the best they could give.
Trembling and horny, I edged back to the window and slipped onto the balcony. At the last moment, I heard Eadie grunt with surprise.
"Funny!" she remarked. "I didn't think we were going to get a breath of wind all day! Look at those drapes!"
I scurried along the balcony, hardly daring to breathe until I tumbled through my own window.
CHAPTER SIX
Our suite had three main rooms. The living room was in the middle with a big bedroom on each side, and each of the bedrooms had a bath and dressing room. The furniture was "modern American hotel," which meant it was functional and luxurious without being anything in terms of style. The carpeting was so deep it almost needed mowing. The armchairs--three of them in the living room--were boxy, with thick, squared arms and backs and crushed velvet upholstering. The couch was built along the same lines, eight feet long, and all four pieces sat well out from the walls. There was a long, low coffee table in front of the couch, each chair had a hexagonal, Mediterranean-style occasional table beside it, and there was a long, narrow magazine table in front of the double window.
With the drapes open, we could look out over the south end of the bay and across a low-lying blanket of smog to the mountains around Tijuana. Southwest, looking as if they were precisely on the horizon, lay the islands of the Coronados group. The taller buildings of San Diego's downtown section poked through the top of the smog, geometrical fingers in the landing pattern for the jets, like isolated spires of rock in a harbor's channel.
With a stiff drink in my hand, I tried to calm my nerves and decide the next step in our attempt to unravel the puzzle we found ourselves in. It seemed to me my thirty-eight was the number one priority; if we couldn't locate it within the next few hours we would have to report it stolen. The last thing we needed was to have somebody use it with me getting the blame. While I felt Carol and Em were the least likely to have lifted it--and Brenda and Jerry practically as unlikely--Eadie and Len were about tied as suspects. I didn't have any idea whether my purse had been rifled while I was unconscious or while I was sleeping off the romp with Len. For that matter, Len could have come back while I slept. But unless Tom knew where she had been, Eadie had been on the loose during the critical time, as well. And if she would seduce a fifteen-year-old, she was equally capable of stealing a gun--or so it seemed at the moment to me.
The one thing I felt was locked down was the present whereabouts of the diamonds. However they had arrived at the decision to do their own recovery, the Murdocks now had their three and the Simones had their one.
Corky returned from his errands looking as horny as I felt. He felt me up so persistently while I was mixing his drink I spilled half of it on the floor. I had little doubt we'd head for the bedroom as soon as we'd drained our glasses. But I did want to brief him on Tom's latest enterprise and hear what he had learned on his expedition.
He chuckled appreciatively over the incident in Eadie's suite. He had spent rather more lavishly at the desk than I liked, considering the fact we weren't on anybody's payroll, but he'd learned a few interesting tidbits. In the first place, both Conn and Eadie had deposited unusually large amounts of money with the hotel management. While Corky had been unable to bribe the exact figures out of the manager, the guy had reluctantly let him know each deposit had been in the six figure range. That wasn't surprising in Len Conn's case, but it gave us a new perspective on Eadie.
In the second place, Emmett Murdock had simply reserved the eighth floor for "the Murdock party," negotiating a flat rate without specifying either the names or number of people who would occupy it. Len Conn, as we would have expected, had identified himself as part of that party. So, the manager had insisted, had Eadie Ferris.
Finally, the reservation was open-ended. Emmett had clearly had his doubts as to the time it would take for negotiations to be completed. Neither Corky nor I quite understood that; it would have seemed everything could have been settled in a matter of hours, the four diamonds being produced in a businesslike manner, bargaining proceeding promptly and everybody going their separate ways. The most likely explanation for the delay was some kind of bidding. And Eadie's funds would suggest she was one of the bidders. Which would also suggest either Emmett had concealed that from us or she'd not identified her position to the Murdocks or Simones yet.
By the time we reached those elementary conclusions, Corky was showing more interest in making out than in the puzzle. And I was ready for him. But the Murdocks interrupted us.
"Hey! You guys were going to let us know whether you'd go to work recovering that diamond!" Emmett sounded put out.
I'm afraid Corky and I both looked stupid.
"Come on, Em!" explained Corky. "You playing games?"
"Games! Man, you have any idea what kind of money we're talking about?"
Corky shrugged.
Carol dropped into one of the armchairs and Emmett into another. I went to the bar to mix drinks for them and refill Corky's glass and mine.
Emmett sighed. "Hate to get figures out in the open when they're still nebulous, but it may help you make up your mind. The people who want the Smoky Quads want them all. They'll pay something in the neighborhood of ten or fifteen thousand for one, thirty to forty-five thousand for two, ninety to a hundred and thirty-five thousand for three. If we can't get that third diamond back, we're out maybe ninety thousand."
"Whew!" Corky didn't try to hide the fact he was impressed. "What would they pay if you laid all four on the table?"
"Somewhere between a quarter and a half million."
"Jesus, Em! What's the matter with you and the Simones? Any school kid... " Corky sputtered.
Em shook his head grimly. "They won't deal with a syndicate--or any other kind of combination. We... well, things have been cool between the Simones and us since Berne. They don't seem to object to swapping, but they get pretty uptight when I bring up the subject of getting together on the diamonds."
"Hmph." Corky glanced at me.
I shared his reaction. If Emmett had really handled the purchase of those diamonds the way Jerry had said, I could hardly blame the Simones for distrusting him.
Corky rose and began pacing. "Em, are you expecting to see some bidding? You got more than one possible buyer?"
After a brief pause, Emmett grinned. "Like to see that. Had some feelers... thought we were going to get at least two buyers going. But right before we came out here one of them got word to us he had no interest in getting into a bidding situation."
"So you're stuck with Conn."
"With one buyer, let's say. Len represents him, that's all."
"What about Eadie?"
"Shelton, I think she's here to keep tabs on Conn."
"A girl?"
"Why not?" asked Carol sharply. "I haven't heard men see any better than women--or are one hell of a lot smarter. You don't think she'd have to do any muscle work, do you?"
Emmett laughed. "There's a woman's reaction, Shelton. Besides, would you want to have her mad at you if you were Conn's size?"
"I guess not. She might be a handful for a big guy, for that matter. Look, I think you've got your third diamond back, Em. You want me to steal the fourth one, thinking it's your third?"
Either the Murdocks were both terrific actors or they were shocked as hell.
"What! What makes you think... " Emmett bounced out of his chair.
"Somebody lifted one of the stones out of the Simones' suite this morning."
"Jesus Christ, man! It had to be either Len or Eadie!"
"Or you."
Emmett was getting angry. "Goddamn it, Shelton! You've no right to accuse us that way!"
"The hell I don't! You know how we work! You level with us when you hire us! You haven't told us the truth yet, and we're damn well not turning into common hoods for you or anybody else!" It was obvious Emmett didn't have a monopoly on high blood pressure. Corky was steamed.
"What do you mean, we haven't told the truth?" demanded Em.
"You lied to us about how you got the diamonds, in the first place. And you're lying about why you and Jerry don't get together to sell them. Hell, there must be a hundred ways you and the Simones could set up a binding deal so one or the other could handle it. Neither one of you is so damn sensitive you wouldn't hold hands with the other for a hundred thousand or so!"
"Got a better explanation?"
"Hell, yes! You both figure you might be able to steal from the other--come out with all four, yourself, and cut the other guy out entirely!"
For just an instant, Emmett's mouth twitched at the corner. Carol jerked her head around and stared out the window. Corky had scored a bull's-eye with that guess.
He gave Emmett no time to recover. "You screwed the Simones in Berne, too! Can't figure out how come you even let him into the deal for one of the diamonds!"
Emmett sighed, then chuckled. "Fact is, we really didn't have enough in our account to handle all four. If Jerry had known that guy was willing to let go of all of them, he'd have insisted on splitting down the middle. The way I worked it, we did get three, Carol and I."
"Which you've got right now. And I'm supposed to get the fourth one for you."
"No! Goddamn it, no! We do not have three! If somebody got to the Simones, it wasn't us!" He spread his hands. "Look. If we can get all four, we'll do it. Jerry handed us the shaft last year, and I'm not about to forget it. But we don't have that third stone!"
I felt a thrill of excitement. Somehow, I believed Emmett this time. I didn't like the way he was ready to screw the Simones, but I was confident somebody was in the act besides those two feuding couples. And that gave the game some zest. Corky's eyes and the tempo of his pacing betrayed the fact he was getting the same vibes.
He turned and studied me for a moment, then grinned. "Okay, Murdock. We'll take the damn job.
You know our rate."
"Yeah, I know it, you damn robbers."
Funny what little things can do to morale. The mere fact we'd accepted an assignment hardly changed anything, but I felt a hundred percent more competent and comfortable. What had seemed a meaningless puzzle--a hopeless jumble of fact and fiction--had suddenly become simply another routine problem. We would have the answer in no time. Corky's step had suddenly become springy; I knew he must be seeing things the same way.
Tom came in, the only sign of his bout with Eadie the gouges on his arms and shoulders. With the marvelous recuperative power of youth, he looked fresh and eager. He even had the nerve to give me a quick once-over with his eyes, raw physical appreciation clear in his expression. I gasped and tried to hide the self-conscious flush of response.
"Hey! I just had another swim. Ead--Miss Ferris, that is, told me she had a book I ought to read. She come by here?"
He'd had time for a swim, I reflected. Plenty of time since I'd left him with Eadie.
I shook my head. "I heard voices from her suite a while ago. You're sure she's not there?"
"She came back down to the pool. Left there about twenty minutes ago. She didn't answer when I knocked."
"Probably visiting Len or the Simones," Corky remarked. His glance caught Tom's eye and the two locked gazes for a long, revealing moment. "Or maybe she's sleeping, Son."
"Well... maybe, Dad. Think I'll change clothes." Our son sauntered from the room, his walk conveying supreme self-confidence.
When his door closed, Carol chuckled softly.
"Watch that boy, Mona. He's too animal to be running around loose. I'm going to give him an invitation one of these days."
Where the room had been taut with hostility minutes before, it vibrated with good humor now. The Murdocks seemed to feel as good about our decision as I did.
Corky grunted. "One more thing, Em. You wouldn't have a spare thirty-eight around, would you? Mona's got misplaced somehow."
Instead of bridling at the implication, Emmett laughed. "We didn't steal it, Corky. Sorry." He sobered. "Hate to hear it's missing. Guns make it sticky when there's a half-million bucks' worth of ice floating around. Somebody could get hurt."
Corky nodded. "Hurt permanent. We'll have to report to the police if it doesn't show up in the next couple of hours. And the people on this floor seem to be the most likely suspects."
"Corky! We can't get the fuzz up here! Christ, that would blow everything!"
"We can't let that gun lie around loose, either. You know what that could do to our license."
"Let's get everybody together and lay it on the line. Ought to be some way the guy who took it could get it back to you without giving himself away."
Corky looked doubtful, but I felt Emmett was right.
"Come on, Corky. Let's try it," I urged.
"I'll get the rest of them down in the lounge at the west end," said Emmett. "You three go ahead."
We went to the lounge with Carol. Len joined us in a few minutes, then Jerry and Brenda. After a time, Emmett showed.
"Looks like Tom was right," he announced. "Eadie's not in her suite."
"Not in or not answering the door?" asked Corky.
"Not in. Well, hell, I don't know. You must have heard me pounding on the door. Nobody sleeps that soundly," Len put his hand to the back of his head. "Depends on the kind of sleeping pill," he muttered.
While Emmett was hunting for a key to fit Eadie's door, Corky and I slipped through our living room onto the balcony. Eadie's windows were shut and locked, except for the one I'd used before. In a moment, we were inside. Her rooms were torn up worse than Len's had been. Even the biggest pieces of furniture were upside down. But she was nowhere to be found. Corky opened the hall door and let the others in while I made another check of the closets. He quieted the hubbub and got everybody's attention in the living room.
"Tom came up from the pool just a few minutes ago," he said. "Told us she'd left there fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. Apparently she took a detour or something; lucky for her she wasn't here, maybe. Anyhow, we might as well get some of the mess straightened up for her. But while we're doing that, you might keep something else in mind."
Nobody had been particularly spellbound up to that point. At the change in his tone, they got real quiet and listened.
"Somebody got away with Mona's revolver this morning. Took it out of her purse while she was sleeping. Any other time, we wouldn't say anything about it; we'd find out who had it and make him wish he'd been born somewhere else. As it is, we don't want to waste the time. In one hour, I'm going to call the police and report the theft. They'll be swarming all over this floor within fifteen minutes when I tell them why I think it was stolen."
Dismay and anger were obvious in most of the expressions around me. Even though they had known what Corky was going to say--even though Emmett had proposed this course--the thought the thief might not come through with the gun evidently stirred a lot of gut reaction. I knew Corky planned to give the thief an easy way out, although neither Len nor Brenda and Jerry did. But Tom appeared in the doorway, wild-eyed, and interrupted.
"Easy, Tom, easy! Somebody turned her place inside out, but she wasn't here. We're going to clean up the mess for her, that's all." Corky turned away from Tom as our boy subsided. "Like I was saying," Corky remarked grimly, "I'm going to call the San Diego police about that gun in one hour. Before I do, I'm going to call the desk clerk and ask if there's a package down there for Mrs. Shelton. If there is--and if it's my wife's thirty-eight--it's going to save a lot of fuss. Now, let's clean up."
Tom helped. I don't think I'd ever seen him look more stricken, and as soon as we'd gotten the worst of the mess cleared up I got him aside.
"What's wrong, honey?" I asked.
"Mom, something's happened to Eadie! I know it has!"
"Oh, no, Son. She must have stopped downstairs to do something. We'd have found her right here if anything had happened."
"How do you know that? Somebody might have taken her away! Besides, she wouldn't spend much time down there in that bathing suit, except at the pool."
I didn't want to think anything had happened to the statuesque redhead. She had a vitality about her that appealed to me and had shown a kind of warmth to my son that would give her a special place in my affections as long as we might know her. But Tom's concern was catching, and I began to feel uneasy myself.
Corky and Tom and I went down to the dining room for supper. It was a quiet meal for us; Corky was probably thinking about the gun, while Tom was worrying about Eadie. The two men cheered up temporarily when dessert was served, however. The chef had prepared an old-fashioned shortcake with strawberries mashed to a thick, sweet mush. With heavy cream and a sprinkling of whole berries and powdered sugar, each bowl would have tried the soul of a calorie counter.
Both Corky and Tom had finished theirs and I was nearing the halfway mark--and slowing badly--when Carol rushed to our table.
"Come quick!" she panted. "Quick, before Em does something desperate!"
Corky initialed the check and we followed her. She refused to say a word until we were in the elevator. When its doors had swished shut, she looked from one to the other of us with a horrified expression.
Tom groaned. "Eadie?" he asked.
Carol looked startled and raised an eyebrow, but shook her head. "No. Haven't seen her yet. Corky... Mona! It's the diamonds!"
"What!" Corky yelled.
"Another one's gone! We don't even know when it happened!"
"Oh, Christ!"
Tom's eyes looked like saucers. He stared silently at each of us, and I realized he'd had no idea what was going on. We had always been careful not to get him involved in our cases, but it was still a jolt to recognize just how innocent he really was. He pressed close to me with questions in his eyes and I squeezed his hand.
"Later, hon," I whispered. "Sh."
He nodded. Carol said nothing more, obviously uncomfortable over having blurted out in front of him. Corky scowled and watched the floor lights impatiently.
On the eighth floor, we went directly to the Murdocks' suite. I expected to see things a shambles and was surprised to see no sign of a search.
Emmett was storming about the living room like a caged beast. He whirled toward us when we entered. "Jesus Christ, Shelton! This is getting serious!"
"Anything left?" asked Corky.
"Yeah. One. Son of a bitch must have known exactly where to look this time! Didn't even turn anything over!"
"Medicine chest or oven, Em?"
Emmett sounded as if he were choking. His face turned brick red and he stared murderously at Corky. "Medicine chest! How the hell--"
"Thought about it a while." Corky went toward the kitchen, Murdock right on his heels.
In a moment, they came back, one of the great, smoky beauties lying on a handkerchief in Corky's upturned palm. Tom gulped and bent toward his father.
"Wowww!" He breathed the word, rather than saying it. "Gawd, Dad! That a diamond?"
"A pretty special one. Somebody's making a collection." Corky turned the stone and let Tom see the blaze of light it threw. "Emmett, we'd better do something about protecting this. And we've got to narrow down the times when the other one could have been taken."
Emmett looked defeated. "How do we do that? Hell, we hadn't looked at either one since last night when you two were here!"
"How about after we left? Go right to sleep?"
Emmett grinned briefly. "Well, can't say we did. Too worked up over that first one being gone, you understand."
"Of course," replied Corky gravely. He glanced at his watch. "Mona, that hour's just about gone. Why don't you and Tom go back to our rooms and call the desk clerk? Let me know if the package has turned up." He paused, clearly turning something over in his mind. "Better check on Eadie again, too. Can't imagine anything keeping her this long."
We left right away. Mention of Eadie had taken Tom's mind off the diamond. We checked her suite before going to our own, and Tom's expression grew darker when we found she hadn't returned. We closed her door and went back along the corridor glumly.
Regardless of Eadie's whereabouts, the thirty-eight was at the top of my priority list when we got inside our own suite.
"I'm going to call the desk clerk now," I told Tom, forestalling his worried remarks about the girl. "It'll just take a minute."
"Wait, Mom. You don't have to call."
"Why not?"
"I've got your gun."
"What! Tom Shelton!"
"Aw, I'll get it. Just a minute."
I followed him into his room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tom opened his top drawer and handed me five cartridges, then my revolver, empty. He grinned with a trace of embarrassment.
"Didn't want it lying there loaded," he mumbled.
"Why, Tom? Why did you take it without asking?"
"Well... " He lowered his gaze and crossed to his occasional chair, an upholstered straight back with open, maple arms. He slouched in it and studied me miserably. "Mom, I don't know if I can tell you!" His voice was low and tortured, "Tom, honey, you really ought. For both of us."
"But, Mom! With everything that's happening, I just... " He stared into my face with pain-filled eyes. "Mom, Eadie's okay, isn't she? She's just got to be!"
Hell, I didn't know if she was okay! With a half-million dollars or so in the manager's safe and diamonds worth that much somewhere on this floor, how could I be optimistic? But the mother in me reached out to my boy's fear. I rushed to him and bent, gathering him to my breast and whispering reassuring promises. His arm slipped hesitantly around my waist, and he squeezed for a time while the combined warmth of his head and my breasts built up in the enclosed space.
I detected a gradual easing of my son's tension and a more relaxed sound in his breathing.
He chuckled unexpectedly. "Hope nobody sees this, Mom. Look pretty silly, a little bitty thing like you cuddling a guy almost the size of his father."
I had to giggle, but I hugged him tighter for a second, knowing we had damn few such moments left to us. He wouldn't permit them much longer. With a laugh, he swung me around and dumped me onto his lap.
"Cut that out, Mom!" he protested. "I'm okay now!"
Like a damn fool, I tickled him to be sure he was completely out of his depression. Now Tom is as ticklish as I am; give him even a light dig in the ribs or in the hollow of his neck or grab at his belly with your hand like a claw, and he goes out of his head. He did that time, jerking and twisting until I thought he was going to throw me onto the floor. He chortled like a child and grabbed frantically at my hand.
When he caught it, he shoved it back and seized it with the hand that was behind me, pulling it under my back. Flushed, the light of boyish revenge in his eyes, he used his free hand to repay me. Undoubtedly recalling where I was most vulnerable in the tickling matches we had enjoyed years before, he went for the muscles that lie between my lower ribs and my hips bones. His hand spanned my belly. His thumb dug into one side of my waist and his fingers into the other. Utterly helpless under the sensation, I doubled involuntarily. My shoulders rocked forward and my knees snapped up to press against my breasts. My feet flailed the air in a frenzy of vain protest. When he refused to stop, I rocked back, my knees still tight against my boobs, and lay with my shoulders pressed to the wood of the chair's arm.
When Tom did pull his hand free, I was obsessed with the notion of avenging myself. Doubling the knee nearer him, I thrust my other leg through the narrow opening in the chair arm and pivoted. The doubled leg dragged across his belly and I drove it under the other arm of the chair, knowing there was no way he could squirm free. Catching the backs of my calves under the chair seat, I pressed him down and grabbed at his ribs with the hand he wasn't holding. Both of us had entered the game, and as his fingertips probed ticklish pockets, I writhed and jerked myself harder onto him.
Suddenly through my frenzy, I became aware of hard, insistent waves of pleasure tearing inward from my pussy. It scared hell Out of me! Sagging against him and parrying his hand the best I could, I discovered my pussy was grinding on a bulging, rounded ridge. I had thrust myself forward until I was riding squarely on his cock! And our game--or my unthinking recklessness--had aroused him to a granddaddy-sized hard-on!
Shaken, I peeked between us. My skirt was tight for a mini; the hem was pulled tightly across my lower belly by the indecent spread of my thighs. The tendons in the fronts and along the inner sides of my thighs were taut and prominent and the creamy, rounded flesh swelled where my weight on his body made it bulge. But there were deep, smooth hollows visible at each side of my crotch, and my pussy was a dark mound inside the filmy netting of my panties. Tufts of black hair peeped out of each side of my panty crotch, curled in tiny ringlets. The crotch, powder blue, was darkened with my own wetness.
I shuddered. The very first time I'd jerked my knees up, my son had seen an even bolder display. But now the display included that fierce ridge of his hard-on lying under the groove my gash formed in the panties. I raised my gaze without lifting my head. Tom's chin was pressed to his chest and I knew he was staring at the lewd juxtaposition of my cunt and his cock. To stifle the sob of mortification I felt in my throat, I flung myself forward on him and hid my face against his shoulder. His hand flattened at the small of my back and pulled hard, crushing my pussy on his hard-on and trapping my clitoris. His other hand restlessly caressed my upper back and shoulders.
Savage bolts of animal desire washed over me, seizing me with sensations that made my body jerk with uncontrollable spasms. My hips snapped forward again and again, grinding my clitoris on his cock and reinforcing the awful lust.
"Oh... my... God!" I jerked out the words between lunges. "I... can't... help... it!"
I never will know, but I thought then and still think Tom was caught in a situation too intense for him. Maybe he could have lifted me off and worked my legs out of the biting trap I'd forced them into. It would have taken a lot of strength, because I was totally hysterical, and not only did I have my feet doubled under the seat of the chair to give me leverage for the scrubbing I was giving his cock, but I had both arms around his shoulders and was clinging desperately to him.
He caressed me, instead. His hands seemed unsure, as if he were unsure, but they rubbed in wide circles that might have soothed me under other circumstances. My mind cleared, even if my self-control didn't improve. I was aware of the difference when he slid both his hands onto my jerking asscheeks. He didn't squeeze them or fondle them, and I was conscious of a vague wonder as to what he was doing. In a moment, when he tugged hard at my belt, I realized he'd gathered up the material of the skirt and was tucking it neatly over the belt. And the fiery new surge of excitement that came when he slipped one hand inside the back of my panties wasn't vague at all.
He fingered my asscheeks, his young fingers lacking the harder texture mature men have. The intimate touch drove me all but insane with desire.
Those panties were, perhaps, the worst I could have been wearing under the circumstances. They betrayed me two ways. First, they were just about as sexy as the industry knows how to design them. Powder-blue nylon panels covered front and back, skimpily. The panels were a fine-woven mesh that didn't hide what was inside but merely veiled it like a couple of layers of gauze. The side panels were fine-gauge open net, made for visual effect rather than strength.
The appearance, with my skirt now securely out of the way, had to inflame a boy Tom's age, particularly when he could see the prominence of his own cock bulging upward into the soft swellings of my pussy. The flimsy construction of the garment provided a benefit he didn't expect.
With one hand inside the panties and mauling my ass, he twisted his other wrist, laid his palm on my belly, and thrust his fingers inside the front of the panties and into the silky brush of my pubic hair. I felt the netting cut into my hips momentarily; then, with a quiet ripping noise, both side panels let go of the front. The panties fell away to lie useless under me.
I gasped as glistening black hair and the edges of hairless, pink mounds came into open view. And Tom grunted as if he'd been kicked in the belly. Out of reflex, maybe, so they wouldn't taunt him with his unintentional destructiveness, he pulled the wisp of material from under me and dropped it on the floor.
The sliding material rasped over raw flesh and shot vicious knives of excitement through me. The same raw flesh came to rest on the cutting hardness of his zipper, which ran along the top of his cock bulge. I felt my labia squirming--rubbing sensitized surfaces on the unyielding zipper--and jerked my hips convulsively.
Tom gazed intently at the writhing cunt, then searched my eyes with his stare.
I nodded miserably, "I... I can't... help it... Son!" Then, with a little better control, "We've gone too far to stop! I don't want to stop!"
"Mom, Mom!" He jerked me to him and gulped savagely at my lips.
His kiss was like the fire of a blowtorch. I rolled my head to rock my mouth on his. Raising my arms to encircle his head, I drove myself onto him and thrust my tongue deep into his mouth. He responded vigorously. His tongue forced mine back and its tip dabbed at my throat while I sucked greedily. At last, I drew my head back, laughing and crying simultaneously. Blinking to clear my eyes of tears, I leaned back and gazed at him.
"Will you hate me, Son?" I whispered.
"Gawd, no, Mom! Gawd, no!" His hand was at his waist, working at his zipper.
I levered myself up while he forced the tab to his crotch, then dropped back onto him. He fumbled with his belt and the button at his waist, then thrust his trousers and shorts down, raising his hips and driving the tops of my thighs cruelly against the undersides of the chair arms while he worked his clothes under his ass. His legs worked briefly and I glanced over my shoulder to watch him kick the trousers away. His cock lay in my gash, then, so hot it was hard to believe. And the ends of his pubic hairs were stiff and sharp, pricking my yielding tissues.
He slid his hands under my asscheeks and lifted me. I watched, gazing past the fullness of my blouse as his cock rose to quiver free of his belly. He pulled my hips forward until his cockhead slid into the wet, gulping softness of my labia. With a jerk, I positioned my cuntmouth on the bulky knob of meat and felt it seat firmly. The small of my back arched inward and my belly touched his. The rotation of my pelvis cocked my cuntmouth so it embraced the blunt tip of his cockhead squarely. With a hard tug of my feet under the chair, I pulled myself onto the rigid post.
My cunt gulped his cockhead and he shuddered violently. Hot and eager, I drove myself back and down while his cock plowed inward among my organs. When my pussy flattened itself at the base of his dick, I lay still on him. I had to let the wild sensations sort themselves out before I could do anything else. But Tom let go of my ass and caught my upper arms, raising me to an erect sitting position. I took hold of the chair arms to steady myself. My son studied me with an expression of joy and disbelief.
As if I had to soften the brutal fact of our incest, I murmured the first thought that came to mind. "You're back where you started, Son."
"Yeah, but I ain't built to get clear inside like I was then."
"No. You're built a lot different." The hard mass that distended my cunt forced that fact home in a way that jarred me out of my self-hypnosis. "I'm going to hug you real tight once more and then get off."
He blinked, but said nothing. I dropped forward onto him and hugged, my cunt tightening to squeeze the fat cylinder in its embrace. Instead of sharing the hug, Tom reached down to grasp my ankles. He pulled them up, making me double my knees, and hooked my feet inside the uprights that supported the chair arms. When he wedged my ankles between the cushion and the uprights, I found I couldn't free them.
He leaned to the side of a moment, then settled in my arms and kissed me. I was a little annoyed at the way he had maneuvered my legs. It forced my knees widely to the side and produced a wider zone of contact between my pussy and his groin. It seemed to thrust me harder onto his rigid cock, too, and heightened the stimulation I was fighting.
With an effort, I got hold of the arms of the chair again and pushed myself erect, feeling as if the new leg position were about to split me. Tom laughed gleefully and seized my wrists. He thrust them behind me and crossed them. I didn't know what he was using, but he lashed them securely together and grinned impudently at me.
"Mom, you don't really want off, do you?"
"Tom! I don't believe it!" His hips surged gently and his cock wiggled in me. I gasped and jerked my legs, my own hips snapping forward and back.
I groaned. "You rascal, you! Oh, you rascal!" He chuckled. He was as pleased as he'd been on those rare occasions in his childhood when he'd put something over on me. Bracing one hand between my breasts to hold me erect, he calmly unbuttoned my blouse. Pushing it off my shoulders, he let it slide down my arms to my wrists. As if he had helped in the design of bras, he immediately worked the straps out of the catches meant for adjusting lift. Then, reaching behind me, he unfastened the main catches and pulled the garment away.
My breasts are my proudest possessions. They aren't globular--they'd sag if they were. But they're fat cones that support themselves. They thrust forward boldly, and when I'm alone I often walk up to the mirror to prove my nipples are the first part of my body to flatten against it. Smooth and ivory, the mounds have a shimmery halo caused by down that's almost invisible. The aureoles swell when I'm excited; as big around as silver dollars, they're like fat platforms for the nipples to jut from.
Tom acted impressed. "Gawd, Mom! You got prettier tits than Eadie! I mean--" His face reddened furiously at the slip of his tongue.
As if to hide his confusion, he grabbed one tit in his mouth and sucked. I know it was the fact he was my son. The hot suction brought a cry of agonized delight from me and I squirmed on his cock. A lust wilder than any I'd ever experienced swept over me. If he'd tried to lift me off then and quit fucking, I'd have fought mindlessly to finish.
But Tom couldn't know that. He threaded my bra between my arms and tied one end of it around each of my ankles. Cautiously, then, he raised me and pulled my legs out of the prison of the chair arms. Back arched, I straightened myself by pulling my knees forward and clasping his hips between my thighs. Without letting me off his cock, he stood and bounced me against him.
"Omigod, honey!" I wailed. "Oh, honey, don't hurry! Just keep fucking and fucking!"
"Mom, you really do like it! You like fucking better'n just about anything else, don't you!"
"Yes! Oh, Christ, y-y-yes!"
"Let's play for a while, then. Okay?"
"Just keep fucking me! Just keep fucking!"
He carried me to his bed. I cried out in protest when he lifted me off his cock, but he laid me on the bed, face up, and went to his door to shoot the bolt. More careful than Eadie or maybe any of the other adults, he checked the window, as well, then returned to me. I lay with my arms under me and my heels tightly snugged against my ass. When he approached, I spread my knees and begged him to bury his dick in me again.
Instead, he raised me to my knees and let me sit on my heels. When he tipped me backward, I couldn't twist my legs enough to free the heels, but lay back over them, my belly arching upward and my shoulders tugged by the fact my wrists were secured by the bra to my ankles.
I forgot the discomfort when he ran his fingers over my drumhead-taut belly and twisted my nipples. My body surged like a coiled spring and my cunt burned with hunger. Tom knelt, his knees driving mine apart, and pulled off his shirt. Naked, he looked like a young Greek god. His cock stood high, where I could see it over the rounded hill of my belly and marvel at its angry redness. His cockhead was like a great dome, flared at the back and split by the gaping opening he'd shoot his jism from.
He seemed in no hurry as he fondled my tits, leaning over me to reach them and letting his dick hang against my belly and his balls against the raging heat of my pussy. He kneaded my breasts as if they were twin loaves of bread. They ached with pleasure and my nipples stood hard and erect, their sides puckered with excitement. My belly button protruded and the banded muscles on my belly writhed and jerked.
"Jesus, Son! Jesus Christ! Fuck me before I go crazy!"
He dragged one hand across my belly and fumbled at my labia. Forcing their already parted faces even further apart, he rubbed the delicate tissues and fingered the rim of my cunt. The heel of his hand pressed my clitoris and I humped wildly. Again and again, always by accident, he bumped the fiery little organ and produced that violent reaction.
"Mom! What's happening! What makes you go like that?"
A crafty light appeared in his face. "How about a trade?"
"What... kind?" I panted.
"If I fuck you right now, will you tell me what's doing that?"
"Yes! Oh, Christ! Anything!"
"You'll show me so I'll know that's really it?"
"Yes, damn it! Yes!"
"Promise? When I ask?"
"Oh, Jesus, Son! Stop sounding like a damn lawyer! I promise! Now, fuck-fuck-fuck!"
He thrust his knees under my ass and forced it still higher. His width pried my thighs apart wickedly. His hand guided his cockhead to the center of my cunt and lodged it there. Using both hands, he pulled my labia apart and eased his cockhead into the yawning opening between them. He clutched at my hips, then, and pulled me onto his cock as if I were a tight glove. In that unnatural position, I found the bulk of the sturdy young prick frightening. But fright merely intensified my excitement and pleasure. Again like a coiled spring, my body lashed up and down on the buried mast.
Tom caught me around the waist and lifted until he could stand erect on his knees. His hips blasted his cock in and out with ferocious blows. Blood rushed to my head. I heard a deep roar in my ears and the room seemed to grow dark. My cunt flamed and my guts knotted. And my boobs flopped back and forth on my chest until they felt as if Tom had poured gasoline on them and lighted it.
"Christ, Son! Oh, Jesus, baby! I'm commminnnggg!"
Pleasure welled through me, powerful inner contractions milking the massive intruder in my belly and their echoes contracting my whole body with great, racking spasms.
At last, the fire subsided. Tom held me as I was, my tender cuntmouth still stretched around the iron like cylinder of his cock. As reason slowly regained control of my mind, it dawned on me my son hadn't come.
"Omigod, honey!" I whispered. "Didn't you come?"
"Not yet."
"Are you... " I hesitated, my throat tight. "Are you going to keep fucking me?"
"Sure! Okay, Mom?"
"Oh, dear! Oh, God, Son! I don't know!"
He lowered me, the enormous hard-on pulling slowly out of me and arousing new tingles of joy. He rolled me onto my face, and with my feet pulled so taut, I rocked on my belly. But when he thrust my knees apart I drew them forward and eased the cramped muscles. I knew how grotesquely my ass was being elevated and how my cunt must gape, but it made no difference. My son's dick was going to house itself in me again--and again and again, if necessary--until he had pumped the hot, bursting flood from his nuts into my belly.
I felt the brute weight of his cockhead at my cuntmouth as his thighs wedged themselves under mine. Again, he lifted me, my thighs straddling his hips and his belly flattening my ass while his cock probed into the core of my belly. I turned my head so I could breathe, and my shoulders depressed the mattress. With long, smooth strokes, Tom pistoned his cock back and forth in the clinging passage of my vagina. My body jerked back and forth in his grip like that of a rag doll. My hair covered my face and my clenched fists gouged at the upper part of my ass. My ankles rubbed the outer softness of my asscheeks and over all was the burning, delicious sensation of friction at the rim of my cunt.
As if struck by inspiration, Tom sank onto his heels. My knees touched the mattress and I panted fiercely at the momentary pause in his fucking. He slid his hands under me, cupping them to hold my savagely throbbing boobs. Lifting, he raised my upper torso until it pointed upward at a forty-five degree angle, impaled at one end of his awesome cock and supported near the other by his cupped hands.
He bounced his hips. I surged halfway up the length of his cock shaft, then slid down it to slam onto its base. In a steady, terrible rhythm, he bounced me up and down his cock until I felt another orgasm seize me. This time, when my cunt began to milk his peter, he rose on his knees and let me hang quivering at the base of his cock while boiling clots of cum blasted into the depths of my belly.
As the spurting jism slowed a convulsive tremor shook him. I shuddered violently in response, my teeth grinding audibly. As if we were some kind of structure, we sagged, then toppled onto the bed. His weight crushed me, his dick still seeming swollen and rigid in me. I struggled for air without realizing how difficult it was to breathe.
"God, Son! Sometimes I wish I could live forever in a single orgasm that never stopped!"
"Oh, jeez, Mom! If I could invent my own Heaven, that's what it would be!"
A dim warning thought tugged at my consciousness. If I let him lie on me very long like this, his youth would regenerate and we'd start fucking again, I was already impossibly late letting Corky know about the gun. Nor had I learned yet why my son had taken it from my purse.
"Tom, honey. I've got to let Dad know we've got the gun!"
"Unh. Okay, Mom." He pulled himself reluctantly off me. "Hey, Mom. Remember that promise?"
"Yes. But we've got to... "
"Sure, Mom. Just wanted to be sure you remembered."
I was already feeling pangs of regret at having committed incest. His reminder lay like a cold lump in my belly where his cock had been, a lien on the future.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Corky had left the Murdocks'. Carol said she thought he'd decided to talk to Brenda and Jerry again. I telephoned to save time and told him I had the revolver.
"Well, we convinced somebody," He laughed smugly, "Sure did!" But I didn't mention who we'd convinced. I went back to our suite, where Tom had finished a shower.
"Son, I really would like to know why you needed my gun."
He came to me, a towel wrapped around his hips, and hugged me. "Okay, Mom. But it kind of embarrasses me. I don't want you to look at me while I'm telling you." He continued to hold me.
When he was small, there had been such times. He'd buried his face against my chest and mumbled his stories to me, then, somehow gathering nerve by not having to face me.
"Came back up from the pool after Dad fell asleep down there. Started into my room and heard you arguing with Mr. Conn. So I peeked in here."
I gasped.
"Well!" He sounded defensive. "Well, he sounded so... so much like he didn't have to listen to you! And you were yelling for him to stop. And your voice sounded all funny-like--mad and hurt and groany. So I peeked. And he was raping you!" His whole body shook suddenly. The towel slipped, to fall unnoticed between us. "You had a wet washcloth on your head and... and... God, Mom! First thing I thought was, get Dad! Only you were making some other funny noises and wiggling like you kind of wanted Mr. Conn to keep doing it! So I got the hell out of there!"
"Oh, Tom! Poor baby!"
"I was pretty mad at Mr. Conn! I kept thinking what I was going to do to him! I took a cold shower, and pretty soon I sneaked back to your room to be sure you were okay. Thought you were dead for a minute, but you were only sleeping. And then I remembered your gun and made up my mind to kill him!"
"Omigod, honey!"
"Well, I got the gun out of your purse and snuck out on the balcony. Only when I got into his room he wasn't there. After a while, I chickened out. I mean, I wasn't scared to shoot him; I was just scared of what you and Dad would do afterward. You know, all the cops and TV and all. And I'd have to tell them why I did it. So I came back here. I kept the gun until I could make up my mind what to do."
"Oh, Tom baby! I'm so glad you didn't ruin your life that way!" I was startled to find my hand was on his dick, absently caressing the meaty head.
He swung me around abruptly, holding me so my back was pressed tightly to him. He groped downward and pulled up the front of my skirt, then plunged his hand inside my panties and grasped my twat. My knees jerked widely apart before I realized it, but I snapped them together immediately and tried to squirm free.
"Tom! For God's sake!"
"Why don't you show me what I was going to make you jump a while ago, Mom?"
"Not right now, Son!"
"Mom! You promised!"
"But... "
"Mom?"
"Well... " I bit my Up. "Okay, Son. But we'll have to do it awful fast! Your Dad's going to be coming back any minute!"
He groaned. "The heck with that! I'll wait. But you did promise, didn't you?"
"I promised," I whispered. I knew that was one promise he'd never let me out of. I had an inspiration. "We haven't checked on Eadie! Why don't you see if she's back yet?"
"If she isn't, I'm going to start looking for her." His voice was grim.
I wondered if he was beginning to fear we'd find a body instead of the lusty, vibrant girl we had known. His expression and the tone of his voice suggested he might be. He jumped into his clothes and hurried out.
After I'd checked my makeup and straightened my clothes, I decided it was time to get down to business. I used the telephone. Corky was still with the Simones in their suite. Answering me in monosyllables and double-talk, he agreed to lure them to the lounge so I could make a quick search of their rooms.
I used the balcony on the other side of the building to get there, since their suite faced north. Like the rest of us, they seemed to be in the habit of keeping their windows partly open, and I had no difficulty. The dusk was far enough advanced to protect me from being seen by accident, and I stepped into their living room as calmly as if I lived there.
I was looking for diamonds. Unless somebody had stolen it, they had one left; they were right where they had started. There were only a few really good places to hide things that size, arid I suspected I might turn up not only their stone but the two missing from the Murdock collection.
The medicine chests the hotel had been supplied with had a clever interior light. There was a cavity behind it that opened into the hollow wall, and Corky and I had agreed one or more of the diamonds could be suspended in that opening in any appropriate bag. That was the first place I checked. To my delight, I found one of the huge stones.
I rolled it out of the makeshift cloth bag onto a tissue, unable to resist the temptation to gaze at it. I knew Corky could have difficulty keeping Brenda and Jerry in the lounge; he'd been with them quite a while when I'd called. But the stone fascinated me. Each time I moved my head, light flashed from a different facet. The smoky interior seemed to generate its own fire, producing a new hue at every angle. At last, I sighed regretfully and replaced the diamond where I had found it.
The table lamps were hollow casts, gummed labels closing off the holes in the bottom. I examined each of the five in the suite, but nothing rattled, nor had the labels been disturbed. The furniture, itself, offered almost no suitable cavities, although each of the end tables had a sneaky hollow just under the top, where the legs were braced by horizontal facing. I even checked the bar, not dumping the bottles and glasses onto the floor, but exploring a cavity behind the little steel sink.
When I had exhausted the more professional niches, including the heater vents, I briefly considered searching through their clothing, then decided against it because I heard Corky's voice outside the door.
I scurried to the window and got out before the Simones opened the door, but I had a premonition they might come to the window for a glimpse of the north part of the city, whose lights now winked like a canopy of jewels. As the Murdocks and the Simones were the only ones occupying north-facing suites, there were several vacant suites on that side, and while the first two rooms west of the Simones' had locked windows, the third had one ajar. Even as I opened it, I heard Jerry's voice. He sounded as if he were right beside me, and I plunged into the dark room head first.
"Hey!" he exclaimed in a startled tone. "Hey! Thought I saw something more down there!"
"Where?" demanded Brenda's tinkly voice.
"Along the balcony! Come on! We'll catch the son of a bitch red-handed!"
My fingers clumsy from nervous tension, I jerked the window closed and latched it. Then, hearing Jerry's footsteps pounding toward me, I dropped to the floor and rolled under the drapes. Jerry rattled each window as he came to it. When he tried the one I'd dived through, I could hear him grumbling to Brenda.
"I'd have sworn they ducked into the second or third window! Hell, this suite's vacant! We ought to get the manager up here with a master key and see how much company Murdock's footing the bill for!"
Their voices faded, then returned moments later, Jerry still muttering. I was moving back to the window when something fell with a crash right in the suite I was in. I gasped and clutched my mouth, stifling an outcry. A light came on in the next room and I heard sounds of closet doors being opened and closed.
Unarmed, I was in no position to face a prowler, and if it were someone involved in the diamond thefts he might decide the best kind of witness was a dead one. My chances of getting through the window before he got into the room I was in seemed marginal, but the noise he was making suggested he was searching. The better hiding place I found where I was, the more likely he'd find me.
I scrambled under the edge of the drapes again and cautiously unlatched the window. Brenda and Jerry had had plenty of time to get back to their suite, I judged. If they'd stayed on the balcony instead of going in, they were simply going to catch me. Even while I was swinging the window open, I was trying to invest a plausible reason for coming out of a vacant suite.
Fortunately, they'd gone inside. Light glared from their window and their voices came to me clearly, but I was safe from their eyes. I edged quickly along the balcony to the door opening onto the little access hall and grabbed the knob. To my horror, it refused to turn; somebody had locked it.
The discovery unnerved me. The balcony had a few lightweight lounges for guests to use while enjoying what was sometimes a spectacular view, and the tiny, lateral access hall had been provided expressly for that purpose. Whoever had locked the door had done so either to prevent people from using the facility or to prevent them from leaving it. The fear that entered my mind was that somebody in our suspicious group had a notion others might be using the balcony the way I was and wanted to trap them.
The Murdock suite was the next one to the west. Beyond it were two vacant ones and, finally, the lounge. The Murdocks' living room windows were open and, like the Simones, Carol and Emmett had the drapes back. From the giggles and grunts, it sounded as if someone was making out. I knew Emmett had a thing about open-air screwing and sweated it out as I approached the open window.
When I reached it, I dropped to my belly and squirmed forward.
Carol's squeal made me tingle. "Em! Ooh, Em!"
I had an awful temptation to peek, but I kept my head down and continued to squirm my way along until I had passed the dangerous opening. Weakly, I clambered to my feet and kept going.
One of the windows in the suite next to the Murdocks' was loose, and I slipped inside. I was in a bedroom, but I quickly found my way to the living room. At the door to the hall, I paused, thinking I heard a noise in the dark. After listening carefully and concluding my nerves were playing tricks on me, I opened the door and started out. The hall was empty, but as I was trying to shut the door without making any sound, a light came on in the bedroom I had just left.
I let out a startled cry and let the door latch click, then turned and ran toward the access hall. The door I'd closed jerked open an instant after I ducked around the corner, and I hugged the wall and trembled for fear the stranger would come my way. There was a long, silent pause before the door clicked shut and I could get back to our suite.
Corky seemed upset. "Christ, puss! What held you up? I left Jerry and Brenda over a half-hour ago!"
I told him.
"Where's Tom?"
"Looking for Eadie," I replied.
"With somebody snooping around those vacant suites? Damn it, Mona! Want to get the kid killed?"
"Why should he be in trouble? If he did run into anybody, they wouldn't give him a hard time! Everybody knows he hasn't anything to do with the diamonds."
"He's got eyes and a mouth. Suppose he sees somebody who doesn't want to be seen!"
"Maybe Eadie is back in her suite," I suggested, fighting the fears his remarks had aroused.
"Let's find out." Corky wasted no time. On the way, he asked what I'd found in the Simones' rooms.
I told him. "At least they aren't out anything," I added.
"Not yet."
No one answered our knock at Eadie's door, but it was still unlocked and we went in. She hadn't been there. The things we'd left out hadn't been touched, nor did it look like any of her clothes had been moved. We took the opportunity to make our own search, checking the same type of hiding places I'd looked at in the Simones' suite and finding nothing.
Corky acted disgruntled. "I still think she's got something to do with it," he muttered. "Maybe the bastard tortured the hiding places out of her and then figured he had to get rid of her."
"Oh, Corky! Please!"
"Honey, don't kid yourself! We've been on cases like this before! Hell, you know they don't give a damn who gets hurt!"
We started back to our own rooms. Suddenly, our door burst open and Tom bounced into the hall. He saw us.
"Mom! Dad! I found her! I found Eadie!"
He had my dressing gown over his arm.
"Where are you going with that?" I asked.
Corky was more to the point. "She okay, Son?"
"Yeah. She's okay, except for an awful sore place behind her ear. She needs something to wear, though."
"What's wrong with her own clothes?" I persisted.
"Our rooms were closer. Come on!"
He led us to the suite beyond the Murdocks'. When he started to go in, it hit me how right Corky had been.
"Tom! For God's sake! You found her here?"
"Yeah! She-"
"Omigod! Don't you ever do a thing like this again! Do you realize you must have missed a dangerous criminal by just minutes?"
"Huh?"
"Somebody came into this suite through a window just a little while ago, Tom! Started turning on lights and... " He whirled to stare at me. "Were you in there?"
"I slipped out just in time! I... " It hit me at the same time it did him.
We both began to laugh, hysteria tingeing our voices.
Dryly, Corky observed, "Looks like you two were playing tag. Scared hell out of each other, I'll bet."
Tom led us into the vacant suite, where Eadie huddled naked and forlorn in one of the armchairs. She grabbed gratefully at my dressing gown.
Tom helped her, but replied to Corky's guess. "I got scared, all right! I was looking in that bedroom when I heard the hall door click shut. I tried to see who it was, but nobody was in the hall." His eyes got round. "Thought for a while they'd come in and were hiding someplace! And then there was this funny knocking noise from the other bedroom, and--"
"That where you found Eadie?" asked Corky.
"Yeah! In the closet, all tied up and gagged! Curled up tight and tied with about twenty pairs of stockings!"
Eadie was unsteady on her feet, but attributed that to the cramped position she'd been tied in. We led her back to our suite and Corky got brandy for her while I applied a cold compress to the lump behind her ear. She'd been sapped with the same precision I had, but if Len had done it, he'd not wasted time raping her. Nor had he let her see him.
"I don't know who it was! I went into my bedroom and the next thing I knew I was lying in that closet with something stuffed in my mouth and me all tied in a bundle!"
She'd found herself lying on her side, her head feeling as if it were going to burst, her knees grinding into her boobs and her arms hugging her thighs, securely tied. Her assailant had been lavish with his use of her nylons. She told us her ankles had been lashed together, each wrist had been lashed to the opposite elbow, and more stockings had been used to pull her feet close to her ass so she couldn't kick.
"When I finally thought I heard somebody, I bumped my head against the closet door," she remarked. "Hurt like hell, but it did get Tom's attention."
"Head any better now?" I asked.
She looked surprised. "It's okay! Good God, Mona, how come?"
"You were lucky. You. got hit in the right place."
Corky interrupted. "What were they looking for in your rooms?"
"Huh? Me, I guess."
"No." He described the conditions we'd found in her suite.
"Oh, no! I didn't have anything!"
"None of the diamonds?"
"Of course, not! The Murdocks and Simones still have them, don't they?"
Corky grinned. "Damn things have been galloping all over the place. Somebody probably thought you had one or two of them."
"Not me." She looked narrowly at him. "Just where do you people fit into the picture?"
"Let's take turns. My turn to ask questions. How the hell did you get in on this party?"
"Why? I'm here; isn't that enough?"
"Okay. Suppose I string together some guesses and some facts. You're not going to know which are guesses unless I get something wrong."
She shrugged. She was not only beautiful and just about as hot as me, but she could handle pressure.
"You represent a buyer for a very special set of diamonds. He--the buyer--doesn't want to bid against anybody else, but he knows at least one other buyer has been in touch with the people who have the stones. He sent you here with the idea some way would turn up to discredit the other buyer's agent. And you've been stirring the pot with that in mind."
She studied him. I was willing to bet she was an independent agent on a job, just as we were, rather than a hired hand. They simply didn't make hired hands that cool.
"You're private investigators, aren't you," she said softly. "I'll be damned! Are you representing a buyer?"
Corky grinned. "A client. I'm not going to say who."
"You knew the Murdocks and Simones before, didn't you."
"Think so?"
"Hell, Corky! I was at that party last night! Remember?"
"Okay. We know them."
She looked thoughtful. "I'm authorized to make an offer. I'm definitely instructed not to bid. And I'm also instructed to buy all four Brighton Diamonds or none."
"No sliding scale, then."
She shook her head. "Not from my buyer. All or nothing."
There was a violent pounding on our door.
Corky yelled at whoever it was, and Jerry flung the door open and charged in. He stumbled to the middle of the room and collapsed, clutching at his head. Both Corky and I sprang to him.
Corky shook his head and swore. "Goddamn son of a bitch! Didn't care if he killed him or not!"
Blood ran from a rupture of Jerry's scalp and an ugly, broad lump was still swelling. I ran to the bar for ice and made a pack to slow the bleeding and ease the pain.
Jerry groaned. "Christ! Bastard like to took my head off! Never mind me! Brenda's gone! When I came to, she wasn't anywhere! Got to find her, Corky!"
"Who was it?" demanded Corky. "How the hell would I know? Oh, shit! Bet he split my skull! Go find Brenda, somebody!"
Corky ran to our bedroom and came back shrugging into his harness. He jerked out his revolver and checked it. "Do what you can for Jerry, baby. I'll see what I can find."
"Need me, Dad?" asked Tom. "No. You help Mom. Oh! Call the Murdocks and see if everything's okay."
But Corky ran headlong into Emmett in the doorway.
"Corky! Corky, the last one's been stolen!"
"What!"
"Gone! Not a goddamn one left!" He spotted Jerry, who had pulled himself into one of the chairs. "Jerry Simone, you lousy prick! Where's my diamonds?" Then, more quietly, "Where's yours, Jerry?"
"Ugh! Screw the diamonds, Emmett. You know where Carol is?"
"Right here." Carol pushed past Emmett and Corky. "My God, Jerry! What happened?"
"Some son of a bitch clubbed me and kidnapped Brenda."
"Oh, Jerry! Jerry! He could have killed you!"
Regardless of the apparent antagonism between the two couples over the diamonds, Carol was obviously a lot more concerned with the bloody mess on the back of Jerry's head right then than about the gems. She had sense enough to let me take care of the injury, but she fell to her knees beside him and threw her arms around him, tears making her eyes look rounder and bluer and her blonde hair falling forward into her face.
"Oh, Jerry! Oh, Jerry!" she kept whispering to him.
"What about the diamond, Em?" asked Corky. "How could anybody get away with it? You two have been in your suite ever since dinner."
Emmett shook his head. "For quite a while, but not all the time. Carol fell asleep on the couch and I went down to the lobby for a newspaper. Saw the... saw somebody I didn't want to talk to. Took some time before I could get back up here. I... well, I happened to check on the diamond and it was gone."
I glanced curiously at Emmett. His carroty hair was a mess and he was sweating profusely. His explanation had limped as badly as if he'd changed it at the last moment. But mostly, he looked like a scared kid about to cry. He was popping his knuckles and shuffling, and from time to time he glanced toward Jerry's head.
"Jerry, sorry I yelled at you," he said awkwardly. "I mean--"
"For Christ's sake! Will you stop standing there and see if you can find Brenda!" Jerry grabbed his head with both hands and bent forward.
"Help!" The cry came for the direction of the window, faint and broken. "Please, help!"
Tom was the first one there, flinging aside the drapes and leaning out. "Dad, quick!"
Brenda hung naked over the balcony rail, her legs spread widely and thrust through the rails, each wrist tied to the corresponding ankle. She was blindfolded and gagged, but she had evidently worked the gag far enough out of her mouth to cry out.
We untied her, Tom and Corky holding her while I worked on the knotted stockings. It occurred to me fleetingly that my son was getting more than a liberal education in this hotel, but neither Emmett nor Jerry seemed in any condition to help Corky at the moment. And if Brenda slipped while I was untying her, the eight story drop would splatter that model's figure and chic, frosted hairdo clear to hell and back.
When we had her inside and partially covered with another robe of mine, she could tell us nothing useful. She hadn't seen her assailant. She'd heard a sound like a melon breaking when Jerry had gone into the dark bedroom. Thinking she'd heard a sound like a grunt at the same time and aware people were getting hit in the head, she'd run after him. She'd tripped over his legs and fallen headlong. Somebody--some man, she assured us--had pinned her to the floor, ripped her clothes from her, and blindfolded and gagged her.
He'd tied her hands and feet, rummaged around the apartment for a time, then dragged her onto the balcony. She tried to let us know without spelling it out for Tom that the guy had hung her over the rail and given her a good screwing before leaving her; it looked to me like Tom understood as clearly as any of us.
"Didn't he say anything?" asked Corky. "Anything at all?"
"I couldn't even hear him breathe! Made a hell of a racket going through the suite, but not a word any time."
All of us went back to the Simones' suite with them. I whispered to Corky and he slipped into their bedroom to see if the diamond was still there. A moment later, he returned shaking his head.
Len had joined us in the hall and come into the Simones' suite with us. He was the only one who happened to be watching when Corky and I exchanged that glance, but I had a feeling he understood it. He frowned irritably.
"Tell you what," he muttered. "Things are getting too Goddamn rough around here. Keep on like this, somebody's going to get killed! Why don't we get together in the lounge about ten in the morning and wrap this whole business up?"
Emmett looked stricken. "Ten in the morning? You... you sure everything's clear?"
The question jolted me. The two men obviously shared some knowledge Emmett hadn't divulged to Corky and me.
Len nodded, his smile reminding me of a cat with a mouse. "All clear. Tonight would be okay, except my return reservation is for noon tomorrow."
As simply as that, the end was in sight. Everybody returned to their separate suites, Corky and Tom and I seeing Eadie to hers first. In our own living room, Corky sprang a surprise.
"I'm going to LA. Have to meet a guy there. Charter flight. Be back about eight in the morning. Tom, you take Eadie to breakfast about seven. Think you can work it? Honey, while they're downstairs, go through her apartment again. If the rocks are there, bring them back here. Okay?"
"Okay." I was thoroughly confused.
"Don't let your mother out of your sight until morning, Son. I'm counting on you." And Corky left.
CHAPTER NINE
The first thing Tom did was check every window in the suite, latching all of them. The second thing was to lock the door, not relying on the night latch but shooting the bolt as well. The third was to face me with a wolfish grin.
"Hey, it's only nine-thirty!" he exclaimed.
I felt as if butterflies were trapped in my belly. "Yes?"
"Yeah! Mom, there was that promise you made... "
"Tom, don't you think--"
"Mom. You really did promise, didn't you?"
My pussy tingled and. puckered. I had no valid excuse for backing away from my promise now. The mother-son thing wouldn't hold water. Not after what had happened earlier. I would put a definite stop to our incest after I'd honored that one promise, but I felt compelled to keep my word, even though I'd given it under duress.
I was reasonably sure of two things. My son's interest in the time of day--his obvious pleasure at the early hour--meant he anticipated we would spend a long time on sex. That he was capable of marathon fucking went almost without saying; his youth and vigorous health guaranteed that.
The second depended on the first. That is, he seemed to have no doubt we would spend a lot of time. His assumption was highly revealing. By nature, he never took either his father or me for granted. He seemed to have an inborn awareness of our strong need to reserve absolute authority for decisions. I couldn't remember his ever having demanded; he'd invariably asked. Nor did he ever betray an inner conviction he could predict what we would do or decide. Even on the subject of the promise, knowing what an obsession I had about keeping my word, he had shown a certain amount of doubt, as if he wondered if the unusual nature of the promise might lead me to renounce a lifelong habit.
His apparent confidence we would be involved with sex for many hours convinced me he foresaw making the decisions himself. And cold certainty settled in my belly how he intended to do that. He was still a boy--very much an imaginative, excitement-loving boy. At his age, I knew, boys long for the authority that hovers so tantalizingly just out of reach. They're so close to being men with a man's authority their whole beings hunger for realization; but they are restrained by convention and arbitrary age standards. Where a durable man would delight in keeping his woman voluntarily committed, the factors were different for boys.
Tom had submitted to my authority all his life. Tonight he was going to fuck me for the second time. He was going to share something with me that contradicted our entire past relationship. But for sheer excitement, how much richer the experience would be if he could at the same time reverse our authority roles. How utterly fulfilling it would be if he exercised absolute power over me.
He was going to tie me up, and I knew it. He had done so unnecessarily the first time we had fucked; he most certainly planned on doing so tonight.
"I'm going to change clothes," I told him.
He grinned. "Scared I'll tear something again?"
"I don't know, but there's no need to risk it."
I was a little surprised he didn't follow me. I had half expected it. But he was evidently quite willing to undress me himself. After an interval of indecision, I changed my stockings for a self-supporting pair. I selected a strapless playdress, snugly fitted to a level even with the broadest part of my hips, then flared to the hemline, which was four inches above my knees. The material--a bright-red sateen--ought to add to the excitement, I reflected. It was a bonus for my son, in keeping with the memorable achievements he would score in this experience. And as an afterthought I clasped a thick, silver choker around my neck and put on a matching bracelet. I had learned long ago how erotic men considered jewelry on an otherwise-naked woman.
I was almost to the doorway when another thought occurred. I returned to my dresser and got out four pairs of nylons my strenuous activities of the past twenty-four hours had ruined. They all had runs, and I had no further use for them. If my son did mean to tie me, the stockings would be a lot more comfortable than anything else I could think of in the suite. I made as small a bundle of them as I could and held them behind me when I went into the living room.
The room was empty. I heard water running in Tom's bathroom and felt a twinge of relief; he wouldn't see me with the nylons. Quickly, I laid them on one of the end tables, as if I had put them there with the idea of sorting them. They were quite obvious without conveying the idea I had brought them out specifically for Tom.
He came into the room in a moment, glowing and naked. My breath caught in my throat at the vision of masculine beauty and grace he presented. I had thought of him in his bedroom as a young Greek god. Tonight the thought seemed inappropriate; he was a tall, youthful savage, lean-hipped, broad-shouldered, boyishly angular, but with an oversized bludgeon for a cock. And his cock riveted my attention. It thrust upward at a sharp angle. He would grow a lot more body hair as he matured, but the small patch at the base of that raked mast was black and thick and shiny. His shaft was so rigid it was actually bowed a little, forming a fat arc. The bellied underside, the part presented to my fascinated gaze, bulged heavily and dark, ropy veins ran along it.
His cockhead rode the top of the shaft like a soldier's helmet. It was as broad as it was long--a massive, blue-red knob with wide-flaring shoulders. Its surface looked like velvet, and a clear drop of fluid quivered over the slit.
At last I managed to start breathing again, drawing a shaky lungful of air into my chest. My belly ached with sudden tension and I felt as if my ribs were constricted by a crushing vest. My pussy tingled and burned until it was all I could do to keep from squirming. The brutal fact was, blind panic was welling in me in a way I had never before experienced.
My son was studying me as intently as I had him. I knew what he saw. My breasts, free of the artificial molding of a bra, pressed tightly against the gleaming red sateen. The material clung, perfectly molding itself to their full curves and fitting my stiff nipples like skin. Because of its sheen, the dress emphasized highlights in a way naked flesh could never have done without oiling. The bodice fitted smoothly across my belly, making each hollow deeper and each swelling more prominent. My navel was a dark shadow in the center of a shiny field. The skirt draped revealingly around my thighs and provided soft outlines where those swelling members curved into the triangle that held my mound.
His chest heaved abruptly and he touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. "Whewwww!" It was a long, low whistle of appreciation.
He came to me eagerly and took me in his arms.
I pressed my belly against his dick, pinning it against his flat abdomen and feeling the unyielding cockhead hard at my solar plexus. My breasts flattened and spread against his lower ribs and I let him bend me backward and took his burning hiss on my mouth.
When his mouth withdrew, the area around my lips was wet from our combined saliva. The lower part of his face was smeared with lipstick and similarly wet, and he licked his lips with obvious pleasure. His hands roved over my back and returned repeatedly to my ass to squeeze and rub. He turned me around without fuss, pulling my back against himself and caressing my belly.
Quietly, he crossed my wrists and held them, reaching for one of the nylons I had brought out. He lashed them together neatly and securely, leaving no slack between them. Then, as if to reassure himself, he ran his hand down my thigh and up under my skirt to brush it over my pubic hair. With an air of satisfaction, he withdrew the touch and let my skirt settle into place.
Gently but without hesitation or uncertainty, he moved me to the table before the window, a long, narrow credenza. On the way, he picked up the seat cushion of one of the armchairs. He laid it on the table, then swept me into his arms and laid me face up on it. My ass was fully supported by the cushion. My shoulders depressed the opposite side of it and my head hung backward to touch the surface of the table. He extended my arms beyond my head, pulling them back until my upper arms were clamped on either side of my face.
I protested with a strained voice. "Honey! That's uncomfortable!"
"Hurt, Mom?"
"Oh, no! But-"
"Okay." He used a second stocking to secure my bound wrists in place, evidently tying it to a cross-member at the end of the table.
The position put a definite strain on my shoulders and drew my belly muscles taut. My tits stuck upward like two volcanoes under the shimmering red of my dress and half of their upper surfaces pulled out from under the top of the garment, swelling with a soft, creamy glow.
Almost casually, my son ran his hand over the quivering mounds. His fingers toyed with the nipples through slippery material and trailed across the naked flesh between the dress top and my choker.
"Pretty nice, Mom," he remarked. "Awful nice!"
"You're terrible!" I exclaimed. But I couldn't make it sound as if I meant it; there was too much excitement and anticipation pushing my voice.
He studied the effect of his handiwork critically, then smiled. "That's pretty good for right now. Time for some exploring."
That meant he'd be taking the dress off me, I assumed. I dreaded the moment, but I knew it would remove the embarrassment it caused to be manipulated while I was still dressed. He seemed in no hurry, however. He took time to tie the end of a stocking to each of my ankles, letting the stockings dangle from me. Abruptly, then, he lifted one of my legs and forced my knee to my chest. He tugged the stocking tight and fastened it to something under the table, securing my foot so tightly it lay outside my hip. He immediately repeated the maneuver with my other leg, and I realized the stockings must run at an angle, being tied at a point somewhere near my shoulders. My thighs parted wildly as I thrust my knees outward to ease the terrible tautness. My skirt tumbled into a crumpled heap on my belly and exposed my butt and my twat.
"Tom! Good God, Tom! Not like this!"
"How come, Mom?"
"It's... it's so lewd!"
He traced patterns on my asscheeks and the backs of my thighs with his fingertips.
"I kinda like it lewd, I guess. Sure gives me a good view. Lotsa stuff to mess with!"
He paid no attention to my continuing objections, but rubbed his fingertip around my cuntmouth. I jerked at my bonds and immediately felt myself slide toward the head of the table. Tom grunted and brought more stockings. He pulled me back into the original, tight-stretched position, slipped one of the stockings across my lower belly under my thighs and knotted another to each end. Tying them to the legs of the table, he provided a harness that prevented me from moving away from him. His expression one of sober attention, his gaze fixed on my upturned, distended cunt, he began to probe at the puffy, pink tissues with one fingertip.
The unexpected generates its own terror. Unfamiliar behavior destroys the basis for prediction, and when one faces the unknown helpless, as I was, panic grows fast. Tom was behaving unexpectedly. His father was impulsive and greedy. I had known from the start what to expect from Corky. It now appeared my son had developed a broad streak of my more deliberate, purposeful character along with his father's strength. He controlled his obvious excitement with firm intent, neither hurrying nor dawdling in what he had decided to do.
His touch inflamed me, as I had known it would. Not only did the physical contact create pleasurable sensations, but the knowledge it was my own son who was getting such an intimate knowledge of my anatomy contributed an extra thrill. I jerked and twisted involuntarily. Heat in the depths of my cunt indicated my juices had begun to ooze. And through the fierce tingling, I could feel my labia twitch and creep.
With slow, sure movements, his prodding approached my clitoris. He seemed to direct his finger toward the edge of my pubic hair more out of a sense of necessary thoroughness than expectation it was worthwhile. Each poke was less urgent and I could imagine his methodical mind insisting on what must have seemed a fruitless mapping.
Almost carelessly, he poked at the mounded fold of flesh that covered the hidden organ. My hips snapped sharply, the touch coming after low sensitivity contacts had lulled me. He interrupted his timing as if considering my spasmodic lurch. Again, he touched the hood of my clitoris, and again, my hips leaped.
He lost his near apathy. "Jeez, Mom! That's it, isn't it!"
"Yes!" I gasped.
The clitoral hood was dry. He scooped copious fluid from the back of my cuntmouth and coated the magic lump. Working with both hands and driving me into a paroxysm of activity, he investigated. In moments, he discovered the hood for what it was and stripped it back. He lubricated the hardening organ under it liberally, then began stroking it gently. Thumb on one side and forefinger on the other, he caressed my clitoris the way I had more than once seen men masturbate.
"Be... careful!" I cried out in terror.
Pleasurable sensations tore at me faster than I could accept them. My son's absorption seemed inhuman, and I was sure it would be only a matter of seconds before he drove me into orgasm. Fear turned to certainty.
"Hey!" he exclaimed softly. "I can make you come this way!"
"Please, honey! Please don't! Not yet!"
But there was no fighting the savage excitement that throbbed in the center of my belly. The ringing demand of my clitoris was in a language so primitive it traveled circuits more direct than those of willful awareness and so urgent it overwhelmed such refinements as civilization and dignity. Its terrible purpose stripped me of my roles and cast me in the single, stark image of sex receptor. My eyes bulged and my mouth yawned in the distension of a scream. My throat corded and poured out a continuous guttural cry of joy. My shoulders hunched rhythmically, my belly surged with my hips and my thighs jerked fiercely.
Pleasure grew and hardened in my gut, and when my son drove a thick thumb deep into my cunt the gathering knot broke in climactic violence. My vagina contracted in convulsive waves and milked his thumb as if it were a stubby cock. My cry undulated with my contractions. My head rocked while my body turned rigid. A ferocious tremor washed over me and subsided only when the contractions slowed and faded.
Tom bent happily over me, one hand laid flat over my pulsing cunt. "Jeez, Mom! That was magnificent! That was just too much!"
I groaned and wet my parched lips. "Jesus God, Son!" I whispered. "Oh, Jesus! It was like going through a wringer!" I laughed shakily. "You know what? Your father's never made me come like that--just pushed me right straight into a climax without a single pause!"
"Really, Mom?" He sounded boyishly pleased.
He untied a knot here and there, moved me, tied new ones, and stood with his cock resting on the thickening wetness of my steaming cunt while he leered at me over the rich red of my dress. I lay in the same strained position on the cushion, but he had pulled me to the end of the table so my ass projected beyond the end--suspended in the open for his pleasure.
"I'm going to fuck you right now, Mom. I got too much pressure in my nuts."
"Oh, God, honey! So quick?"
"Sure." He sounded brutally casual, but a thread of harsh impatience edged his tone.
His cockhead settled among my raw membranes, wedging them aside as it nudged its way to the rubbery ring of my cuntmouth. He leaned on the thick shaft while his bulbous cockhead sank into the slippery, elastic rim. The neck of my cunt gulped at the knob that choked it and his cock plunged toward the core of my belly. He rested his hands on the taut, sensitive roundness of the backs of my thighs and his hips jerked back and forth. His cock was a bulky plunger in the soft pulp of my womb, sloshing in and out in a gummy coating of my own juice. The hardened ridges of his thighs cracked on my taut, mounded buttocks and his balls thumped the quivering flesh around my anus.
Filled with his bulging, imperious cock, I shuddered horribly at the persistent image I carried in my mother-consciousness. The higher my excitement rose, the sharper became my awareness his lunges were the salute of son to mother.
Our relationship was, for a period I could only guess at, symbolic of youth fucking the flesh that had born and nourished it. But there was nothing symbolic in the sensations that savage young cock generated in my still-young, still-greedy femaleness.
My son battered me with machinelike rhythm. The table groaned under the strain his blows imparted through me to its joints. My flesh surged back and forth over my firmly held skeleton. I fought for breath in a whirlpool of delight that left only accidental moments for breathing. Jagged fingers of pleasure plucked at my boobs and my cunt and every quivering, squirming muscle of my body. The knotted nylon that bit into me aroused localized agonies of pleasure and magnified the overriding awareness of that boy-man prick spearing up my middle.
He came with a great, gusty storm of sobs. His voice deepened as his cock stilled. His pelvic bone ground senselessly on my clitoris while he pumped seething streams of cum into me. A storm of fierce joy convulsed me in a second wild orgasm and I screamed lustily at him.
We sobbed together as our frightening violence tapered off. Tom's explosion had startled him and he clutched at my helpless form in a weird, touching gesture of supplication. Outwardly he was master of the situation--absolute master--his fine, powerful physique dominating my outstretched, bound softness. Inwardly, he was briefly a terrified little boy crying out to be cuddled and reassured. I was helpless to cuddle him; my joints were obscenely stretched and my limbs extended solely for the purpose of making me totally available for fucking. Nothing in my posture was calculated to provide the image of motherly tenderness. But through my tears of glutted lust, I could murmur broken terms of endearments and deep-felt praise for his splendid performance.
"You fuck magnificently!" I told him.
"Really good, Mom?"
"Fantastic! Honey, your father and I are in a rough business. Sex isn't a thing we treat like a fragile, sacred relic. It's something we take whenever we have the chance. We love it and make the most of it. Some damn good men have fucked me, some because I wanted them to and some because they were stronger than me. I made the most of it every time, and I haven't had one cock shoved into me with any more power and authority than yours." Reckless in my enthusiasm, I used a phrase borrowed from the masculine standby about shoes under the bed. "Fucking like you do, you can ball me any day of the week!" The instant I said it, I could have kicked myself. I hoped to God he had sense enough to take it as I'd meant it. If not, there would be stormy times while I was convincing him.
For the moment, that was an academic issue. His appetite had been whetted and the strength of his success--I'd just told him how great he was--would carry him in a rush over my most vehement demands. I knew without bothering to test the notion he wouldn't listen to any order I might give. Not tonight. If I grew too insistent, he would stuff a gag in my mouth and go on doing what he wanted to until he was too tired to continue. And he would do so without a single twinge of conscience, knowing as well as I the stockings hadn't gotten on that table by accident. He knew I'd entrusted myself to him--that I'd surrendered my authority to him for the night and was simply a grown-up version of the stuffed toys he'd been God to as a child.
When he recovered his equilibrium, he dragged his semierect cock out of my vagina and began untying knots. He left my arms immobilized until he had every other stocking loosened and straightened. My legs were free and I had a choice. I could keep them doubled, letting my thighs rest on my belly. Or I could let them hang, since the edge of the table was under my butt and could provide no support to my thighs. I accepted the strain of letting them hang, their weight arching my back and forcing my belly upward while my pussy jutted above the downward-angled thighs. My skirt was still bunched at my waist and Tom openly spent half his attention on the awkwardly displayed nakedness of my lower belly and pussy.
When he finally had all the stockings ready for use, he untied the one that pulled so tightly at my extended arms. He lifted me from the table and put me on my feet, steadying me while the numbness wore off. When I sighed and grinned at him, he gave me a quick hug.
"All there now?" he asked.
"Like new," I replied. "You sure make a woman know she's been had!"
"Know what, Mom! A guy knows he's had something special when he fucks you!"
I shivered, my dress still imparting that curious sense of wickedness to our intimacy nakedness would have relieved.
"All through for the night, Son?" I managed to make it sound matter-of-fact. "I'm about ready for a night's rest."
He grunted amiably. "You aren't going to get any. We're barely started. I got a lot of fuck left."
"Son! Good God!"
As if he thought it would be dangerous to stand around talking, he swung me around and pushed the fronts of my thighs against the back of one of the armchairs. I knew instantly what was coming next. But he paused to unzip the back of my dress, letting the soft folds slither down my body with a gentle caress. I stepped out of it thankfully, feeling myself psychologically committed to fucking now that everything was exposed. He crouched behind me, sticking his cock between my thighs and forcing it up until it shoved hard at the pulp of my labia. He reached around me and kneaded my boobs, his fingers hot and dry on the perspiration-dampened softness. I wriggled happily against him, surrendering to the pleasure of flesh on flesh and blocking out the disquieting knowledge I was a mother rubbing her naked body against her adolescent son's naked body.
Tom leaned forward against me until his weight forced me to bend at the hips. Slowly, as if savoring every second of the experience, he folded me over the back of the chair. I collapsed to hang on it, ass in the air and forearms resting on the seat cushion. My son came around to the front and untied the knots that held my wrists together. He tied me with one arm over each of the chair arms, elbows bent and a stocking stretched between each wrist and one of the front feet of the chair. My upper torso hung inches above the cushion, but to provide more clearance, he pulled the cushion out of the chair and flung it aside.
For a time, he amused himself by reaching under me to fondle my tits. He clutched each in one hand and pretended to milk me, arousing a strange, unprecedented kind of thrill in me. I got so excited at that weird game, I actually pretended I was a domesticated creature kept only for the purpose of supplying milk, bred as often as necessary to keep me running fresh.
He stopped his playful milking eventually and fastened my legs at a wide angle, looping stockings around my knees and knotting the other ends together across the front of the back cushion. I found it was impossible to reach the floor, even with my toes, and I waited tensely for the torment to resume.
Tom was in no way concerned about conserving his strength or energy. Nor did he seem to worry about mine. He spread the thick goo from my cunt over every exposed surface, even coating the backs of my thighs and my upthrust asscheeks. With my weight supported only under my hips, my torso sagged in such a way as to rotate my cunt back and up, and my asscheeks flared apart uncontrollably. My son obviously discovered how the position dilated me; he thrust one finger after another into my cunt until one whole hand was buried in me, only the thumb staying outside. And covering that thumb with slippery juice, he thrust it without warning into my ass.
The penetration startled a full-bodied scream from me and triggered a violent heaving of my hips. Tom's only reaction to my wild thrashing was to capture my clitoris with the fingers of his other hand and drive me into passionate pleading. Within the space of a few breaths, I was as fiercely aroused as if it were the first fuck of the week. My son was learning to pace me, however, and denied me the relief, however temporary, of orgasm. I began to sense he had made up his mind I would reach my climaxes only when he reached his, and he was diabolically accurate in his judgment of my excitement level. Again and again, he let me surge to the very edge of an orgasm, only to remove every stimulus while I slipped protestingly back to a lower pitch.
"Gotta go again!" he announced suddenly. "Mom! I gotta fuck you again!"
He rested his cock against my gaping flesh, angled it downward at the proper angle, and sank it in my quivering cunt. His hands gripped my asscheeks and he hoisted himself onto me, letting his own thighs rest on the outer surfaces of mine and laying his insteps into the hollows behind my knees. When he was securely mounted, he lifted his hands and let his entire weight concentrate on the base of his buried hard-on.
With gentle, rhythmic shoves of his feet, he set himself to bouncing on me. His hundred and fifty pounds drove his cock in and out with short, brutal strokes until it felt like the butt of a telephone pole had been planted in my flaming body. The sensation was insanely stimulating. It drove me out of myself and created in my place a screaming maniac who was nothing but a frame for an insatiable cunt.
My orgasm seemed like the emotional fabric for a silk-lined bucket to receive my son's emission. Heat flooded through me from the fabulous pool in my belly and my whole body felt like the lining of my vagina.
CHAPTER TEN
The sky was a pearly gray through the living room window. From ten o'clock at night until now, five in the morning, I hadn't spent one minute free to make a decision. I hadn't spent one minute sleeping, either, or even sleepy. My nerves had jangled with sex response the entire time, and I had made no effort to estimate the amount of my son's cum I had received.
At the moment, my thighs were pressed hard against my belly and my knees were pushing my boobs together. My arms were wrapped tightly around my thighs, each wrist tied to the opposite elbow. My feet were free to kick at empty air. I was sitting, my son's hands holding me upright. I was impaled on his rigid dick while his bouncing hips tossed me up the wrist-thick shaft and let me crash down it to blast onto his pelvic arch. My throat was dry and my eyes burned, but imperative waves of lust wrung moans of pleasure from me and the ecstasy of another climax burst over me. Tom arched his back, his hips thrust high off the floor and his magnificent cock a great mast surrounded by my soft, churning tissues.
My cry undulated in a wordless song of delirious happiness.
"Unh! Unh! Unh!" My son's voice came out as sharp, spaced grunts, each seeming to blow another clot of jism into me.
My spasms ceased and I curled limply, utterly exhausted. Tom's hips sank back to the floor and he held me carefully, letting his peter soften in the unfeeling clutch of my vagina.
"Is... is that all the fucking, Son?" I asked in a weary whisper.
"Why?"
"We've got to save a little time to get cleaned up and dressed. You're supposed to take Eadie to breakfast." I knew we had fucked away the last chance for any sleep.
"Okay. Guess it is getting time for that. You want a shower or a bath?"
"I'm going to take a shower. I'd go to sleep if I sat down in the tub."
"Okay. Shower it is. We'll try fucking in there."
"The hell you will! You've fucked me the last time you're going to for this session! What kind of Goddamn fiend are you?" My voice rose to a desperate shout. It was incredible he could still believe himself capable of sustaining another erection, let alone another load of jism.
He laughed delightedly and began to untie my arms. I had come that time facing sideways, and when my arms came free, my feet dropped to the floor beside his hip. I sat hunched, too weak to lift myself off his cock. Without fuss, he turned me, pivoting me on the upthrust dick until my back was to him. Calmly, ignoring my feeble resistance, he lashed my wrists together at the small of my back. Only then did he lift me off his cock and scramble to his feet.
He led me to the bathroom while I twisted and swore at him. Closing the door, he sat me on the toilet and began to regulate the shower temperature. I continued to swear and threaten and he continued to grin and ignore me. When the water satisfied him, he pulled me unceremoniously to my feet and yanked me into the shower with him. He crowded me into a corner and applied the soap liberally. When I was covered with stiff, white lather, he began to rub his cock against my slippery belly.
I cursed viciously, the stinging water beginning to revive me.
"Hey, Mom! I like it like this!"
"I'm not going to take another load in my twat, come hell or high water!" I screamed at him. "Okay."
He forced me to my knees. Jamming his knees into my armpits, he pressed me against the side of the shower. He grabbed a handful of wet hair at each side of my head and thrust my head back. He had to shift his hands, winding the fingers of one in the thicker hair on top of my head and seizing his cock with the other. He pushed the great, pulpy head to my lips.
I was overwhelmed by respect for my boy's amazing durability, His peter had hardened again and again during the night, its ability to recuperate challenging my own. Awed now at its fresh turgidity, I forgot my resentment and willingly took it into my mouth. Hot and meaty, it filled me with renewed lust. I ground my thighs to stimulate my aching pussy and sucked vigorously.
"Gawd, Mom!" Tom's tone registered astonishment and a new kind of excitement.
He slid one foot between my knees and let me scrub my clitoris on his shin. I thrust my face forward to gulp more of the beautiful dick. As I sucked, my tongue caressed the fat lobes bordering his slit. His breath turned to panting sobs and his thighs trembled violently.
"I didn't know! Mom, I didn't know you would! Let go, Mom, before it comes in your mouth! Mommm!"
He retreated, but I lunged after him. Trapped against the far side of the stall, he shook feverishly while I redoubled the savage suction.
"Mom! It's there! Right now!"
He was right. It was there. He was still capable of spewing knotted ropes of viscid, warm cum into my throat. I swallowed frantically, but the overflow spurted around his dick and clung to my upturned face. My throat still working furiously, I gazed into his wild, staring eyes.
"Oh, my Gawd, Mom! Oh, Mom!"
I sucked his cock clean, pulling the entire shaft into my mouth as it shriveled, then slowly released it. Downing the last reluctant lumps of jism, I smiled at him, my head tilted back and strings of cum beginning to dry in sticky gobs on my face and chin.
Badly shaken, Tom quickly washed my face. He pulled me to my feet and held me under the spray while the soap sluiced off. He struggled with the soaking knots of the stocking at my wrists, and when they were free I flung my arms around his shoulders and kissed him greedily. Our wet bodies slipped against each other, my nipples tingling and my pussy pulsing. I was aghast to discover his drained prick was swelling again.
"Tom? Son?" I whispered throatily. "Honey, you want to fuck once more before we quit?"
"Will you, Mom?"
I tightened the grip of my arms and drew my legs up. I clasped them around his waist and he raised me, then lowered me onto his cock. With an abandon that belied all the ferocity we had expended during the night, we fucked ourselves to the point of collapse in the shower.
Afterward, when we had dried each other and lazily dressed in my bedroom, pausing from time to time to feel each other up, we kissed briefly in the living room.
"Honey, let's not ever forget last night and this morning," I said softly.
"Not likely!" He gave me an impudent grin. "I better see if Eadie plans on eating breakfast today."
When he and Eadie got on the elevator, I hurried to her suite. My quick search of the better hiding places revealed nothing, and I wondered why Corky had wanted me to repeat the fruitless exercise. On the point of returning to our suite, I let the question stop me. Eadie had been out of circulation for hours. Tom had found her bound so securely she could hardly move, and she had still been suffering from the hours of poor blood circulation when we'd gotten back to her with our son. She had been with us, then, until after we'd learned the last of the diamonds were gone. Whoever was collecting them, it seemed impossible the girl had anything to do with it.
That, I realized, was what Corky had considered. What better place to hide the stones than in the suite of the person who couldn't possibly have them? It was puzzling that the thief had failed to use one of the more secure caches; perhaps there had been some interruption.
Thoughtfully, I resumed the search. Almost immediately, I found what I was looking for. A pretty chamois bag hung between her raincoat and a light topcoat. It reminded me--maybe I was merely sensitized--of a hairless scrotum with extra balls. When I fingered it, the shapes of its contents were so distinctive I wouldn't have needed to open it to identify them. Grinning at my cockiness, I loosened the drawstring and let the magnificence of the four stones take my breath away. Wrapping them carefully, I put them back in the bag and thrust it into my purse.
While Corky had promised to be back by eight, it seemed prudent to eat without waiting. I went down, avoiding our suite and only a little uncomfortable about the fortune in my purse. Hoping to prevent Eadie or Tom from seeing me, I selected a table in the poolside extension of the dining room, where foliage plants in tubs provided an open screen. Corky would have grinned, I reflected; he would have said I was playing detective. I had an excellent view of the dining room, the interior entrance to the lobby, and the pool, while being practically unnoticeable myself.
Before the waiter had brought my order, Tom and Eadie left their table. To my left, where I had failed to see him, Len Conn rose a moment later. My son and the auburn-haired beauty came toward me, little suspecting I was there. They appeared totally engrossed in each other, and from Eadie's teasing glances I had a hunch they meant to spend an hour in her apartment.
Len moved unobtrusively to intercept them and they stopped on the other side of the foliage from me, the suave, handsome man blocking their way. Clearly believing the impasse to be accidental, Tom and Eadie chuckled and sidestepped to pass between Len and the pool. But Len moved sideways and continued to delay them.
"Excuse us." Tome sounded amused and faintly vexed.
"It's all right," remarked Len. He made no move to let them pass.
"We were leaving," said Tom. "Sonny, I've got eyes."
Tom flushed and stared uncertainly at Len. "Well, then... "
"Look, kid. Shove off. I've got something to say to the broad." Len's low tones barely carried to me.
I realized no one else was near enough to the three to hear what was being said, although guests at several tables had paused to watch the play of expressions. The group was noteworthy, I thought. Eadie was a striking woman--at that age where she could easily have passed as a teen-ager in other clothes or as a chic, worldly woman in a slinkier garment. Len had a strangely disquieting appearance of deadly menace, although he was smoothly dressed and an unusually attractive man. Tom, already six feet tall and marvelously developed through the shoulders and chest, was a breathtaking example of modern youth.
Even with their words too low to be heard, the three seemed to generate an electric atmosphere of tension, and their expressions suggested the situation was becoming explosive. I knew Tom too well to think he would meekly submit to the kind of humiliation Len offered, and the gentle, negative shake of his head came as no surprise.
"We're leaving, Mr. Conn," he said softly. "Excuse us, please."
"Boy? You're not only overgrown, you're stupid. You're leaving; the broad isn't. Now, get lost!"
Tom's features hardened into an expression I'd come to know in his father. "Sir... " My belly tensed as I noted the flicker of Len's hand. I winced, knowing how intense the pain in Tom's belly was going to be when the short, low jab jolted home. I started to my feet certain I could do nothing but comfort Tom when it was over.
It appeared that Tom's own arm moved by accident; his youthful reflexes brought it across to deflect the blow without his quite knowing what was happening. In the moment his wrist struck Len's, Tom thrust out his other arm to ward off the forward surge of Len's body. Len's short lunge was redirected and before he could regain his balance he plunged over the lip of the pool and into the water. Tom's eyes widened with astonishment. Eadie's flicked wide for an instant, then narrowed with delight.
"Tom!" she exclaimed. "Oh, how beautiful!
And you didn't even mean to do it! Ooh, sweetie! Delicious!"
I reached them about that time. "Move!" I snapped under my breath. "Get the hell out of here!"
"I... I can't do that!" Tom protested.
I started to insist, then realized how right he was. In his view, Len's dunking had been an accident. Tom knew his reflex actions had thrown Len into the pool, but he had no sense of triumph--no glow of deserved victory. Leaving before the sputtering man got out of the water would be running away.
Len clambered back to the deck, water streaming from his expensive clothes. He surged toward Tom, fierce determination glaring from his eyes.
"You punk little son of a bitch!" he exclaimed. "Make a monkey out of me, will you! That kind of luck doesn't come twice in a row!" He feinted with his left, then his right, and drove a vicious blow toward Tom's lower abdomen.
"Hey!" Tom's head had rocked to avoid each of the feints, but his hand stabbed down to clamp on Len's forearm and spoil the punch the man was counting on. "Hey, man! You got a thing about swimming?"
I heard a chorus of delighted gasps as Tom's other hand snaked out to grasp Len's belt. The boy heaved violently and Len sailed in an arc, arms and legs flailing, toward the center of the pool. He vanished in a tremendous splash. By the time he surfaced, the breakfasters had all leaped to their feet with laughter and applause.
Tom looked briefly confused, grinned sheepishly, and led Eadie from the scene.
When Len pulled himself out of the pool, I met him.
"Honey, you ought to chalk that one up to experience," I told him quietly. "Might get dangerous if you got to brooding about it."
"That's right, lady," someone said right behind me.
I saw Len's gaze flick past me and thought I detected a spark of surprise or recognition, but it was gone so quickly I changed my mind. Len grinned suddenly.
"Okay, okay. No sweat, Mona. That kid of yours has the luck of the Irish. How about a cup of coffee?"
"You'll have pneumonia if you don't get into something dry," I replied.
"Not in this weather. Already getting hot!"
He went to my table with me. The waiter was setting my food at my place and readily agreed to bring a cup of coffee to Len.
"Begging your pardon, sir, but that was a spectacular dive! Never know about these youngsters."
"Sure don't," muttered Len. After the waiter had left, Len frowned. "You see the whole thing, Mona?" Then, "Hell, you must have."
"Yes."
"Did he really beat me to the draw?"
I giggled. "If that had happened on a frontier street with forty-fours, you'd be dead."
"How, for Christ's sake? How'd he do it?" He shook his head, "He couldn't have known I was going to slug him!"
"He didn't. He didn't even know he was blocking a punch, Len. It was all reflexive."
"Jesus! The kid's a freak!"
I rubbed it in a little. "He and Corky spar around quite a bit. Corky says the boy's got good timing and pretty good eyes."
"Bet he lands as many as his old man."
I hesitated, trying to remember a single time, then sighed. "No. Tom keeps saying he's going to get there someday, but it's still pretty much a little kid swinging at the air. Corky doesn't make a big deal of it, but he tags Tom just about when he wants to."
"Whew! Useful thing to know!"
I gave him my sweetest smile. "Don't swing a sap at Corky if he can see it coming."
"Ouch! You know how to hurt a guy, don't you!"
"Friendly warning."
"Speaking of friendly warnings, look sexy! Here comes your old man now."
Corky studied Len's dripping clothes, then settled into a chair. "Drinking already?" he asked.
Len laughed. "Drinking, hell! Zigged when I should have zagged! Ran into that kid of yours and he outpointed me!"
"Oh, no! Damn it, you know how clumsy kids are."
"Don't get the wrong idea, Shelton. It wasn't that way. I wanted to talk to Eadie privately. Took the big brother approach with Tom and got dumped in the pool for it."
"The hell you say!" Corky's mouth twitched. "Turn your back on him?"
"Turn my back! Started to poke him in the belly! Okay, maybe I underestimated him that time. When I got out of the pool, I knew what he had. Made up my mind to give him a lesson and the Goddamn kid picked me up and threw me halfway across! Call that clumsy?"
Corky looked as proud as if we'd just had a new baby. "Well, I'll be damned!" he exclaimed softly.
Len finished his coffee and left. Corky ordered breakfast and I dawdled, waiting for him. He didn't want to talk about his trip, but was smugly pleased when I told him about the diamonds.
"I've got to talk to Eadie," he remarked as we left the table, "Knock. I suspect Tom's with her."
He chuckled. "Ten to one, he goes out the window."
"You're on."
A sweet little old lady stopped me to ask if I knew the boy who had defended that gorgeous girl. Corky chortled and left me with her. When I was finally able to break away, I followed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When I got off the elevator at the eighth floor, no one was in sight. Evidently, Eadie and Tom had been able to clear the decks in a hurry when Corky had knocked. If Tom had gone out Eadie's window, he'd have made it back to our suite without using the hall.
In a momentary digression, I wondered why Brenda's kidnaper had moved her to the south side of the building the night before. The north balcony surely would have served as well. Of course, Jerry would have found her sooner.
Gnawing at the puzzle, I had no idea anyone was behind me until I saw a flicker of movement at each side of my face. Something cut into my throat and chopped off my breath. Choking and terrified, I felt myself jerked backward by the neck. In an instant, I'd been dragged into the vacant suite next to ours, away from the safety of the hall. Only after a foot kicked the door shut was the awful constriction at my throat relaxed. Masculine hands caught my shoulders and flung me to the floor. Still fighting to clear the restriction that remained in my air passages, I rolled swiftly to a defensive crouch. Len Conn stood over me, hands on hips and benign smile on his lips.
"Ought to take lessons from your kid, Mona." There was light mockery in his tone.
"Goddamn you, Len! You want to kill me?"
He chuckled. "Thought about it. No, I guess not."
"What the hell did you put around my neck?"
He showed me a short length of cord, perhaps two feet long" "Didn't need this much, of course. But what the hell?"
"What's the big idea?"
"Don't figure we'll be seeing each other after we take off today. Last chance, you might say."
"This way?"
"Something about you, Mona. You're so Goddamn cocky! Hell, I know you'd probably come to my room if I asked, but this way I score one on the whole damn Shelton family."
"Big deal! I see you pick the woman. Makes you a hero, Len?" I scrambled to my feet.
I'd dressed in the same red thing I'd worn for Tom. Of course, I'd had the sense to wear a bra and panties under it; no percentage in leaving a bunch of cardiac arrests down in the dining room. But I could see Len found himself reacting to the thing. While I had no real objection to shacking up with him--after all, I had time to kill--I was getting angrier as the pain in my throat turned into a fierce ache.
"You're out of your mind!" I exclaimed.
I swung my purse at his head and, when he dodged, lashed out with a sideways kick to his shin. Maybe he'd expected that. He evaded the kick as easily as the swing, and his toe hooked under my extended ankle and jerked me off my feet again. Furious, I started up again, but his hand connected high on my cheek and knocked my sprawling.
"You dirty son of a bitch!" I yelled. "I'll kill you for that!"
I wasn't going to kill him with my gun. My purse had spun under the couch, gun and diamonds and all. But I didn't care. A few good judo chops would put him out of business.
Before my hands even left the floor, he hit me twice. The first blow caught me on the left side of my head and rocked me. The second, with his other hand, exploded against the right side and flattened me again, knocking me across the floor and leaving me spread-eagled on my belly, groggy and hearing ringing noises. With a tired grunt, I raised my head and shook it, trying to clear the cobwebs from my mind.
Len slapped it and knocked my face back to the floor, then knelt over me. Sitting on my butt, he pulled my zipper tab down my back and unfastened the catch on my bra. While I twisted weakly, he flipped the back of my skirt up and grabbed my panties, shredding them with one vicious yank. He seized me by the hair and jerked me to my feet, shoving the strapless bra and the loose dress so they fell at my feet.
"This is working out pretty good!" he exclaimed. "Want to go another round?"
I panted and gave it careful consideration. If he'd leave me on my feet a few more seconds until my head cleared, I'd stand a good chance of crippling him. But I definitely couldn't risk making a move until I'd recovered my equilibrium.
He watched me sway and laughed. "Go ahead, baby! Try it!"
I groaned and exaggerated my unsteadiness. His eyes narrowed.
"Figure you can fake me out?" he asked. He turned, as if contemptuous enough of me to turn his back.
My muscles jerked automatically and his elbow smashed into my belly. The air in my lungs burst from my throat in a loud, sharp grunt as my feet left the floor. Stunned and nauseated, I landed on the couch and clutched at my belly muscles. Len snatched at my hair and yanked me up once more, but I couldn't catch my breath or straighten up.
He jerked my hands behind me and twisted the strangling cord around my wrists, lashing them together.
"No need to do that," he muttered. "But it might take a few more minutes to convince you, and I don't want to be late to that meeting." He threw me to the floor, planted one foot on my streaming hair, and began to undress.
When he was naked, he seized my ankles and flipped me onto my face. "Still say you've got one hell of a great figure for a broad your age with a fifteen-year-old kid," he commented. "One of the nicest-shaped asses I can remember."
He straightened, lifting my feet. As he continued to lift, my knees left the floor and then my hips.
"You'll break my back, you lousy bastard!"
"I doubt it. You're in pretty good condition."
Maybe I was, but it felt as if my spine were going to snap. He turned me, then, so I bent the way I was supposed to, and kept lifting until the backs of my knees were at his shoulders. Bending one leg at the knee, he sort of left my safety up to me. He let go of my leg and I kept my knee bent, the calf of my leg riding his shoulder while he put that arm around my middle. He clasped me to him and let go of the other leg, then used his free hand to poke around at my twat.
I jerked furiously, trying to grab his dick and give it a good gouge, but the tissues of my pussy were raw from a whole night of fucking, and the sensations he aroused distracted me. My hips snapped back and forth and my shoulders twisted helplessly while waves of pleasure washed over me.
"Hell, woman! That's more like it! Now we can get down to the good part!"
Handling me like a baby, he righted me and shoved me toward the credenza. The drapes were open and the sunlight streamed in, reflecting brightly off the polished surface. The table top came to my navel when he bent me forward, and he lifted me by the hips, sliding me on my boobs until the edge dug into the tops of my thighs.
To my amazement, he untied my wrists. His hand fumbled at my pussy and shivers of delight rippled through me.
"Damn it, Len! It feels so good! Why couldn't we have started out this way?"
"I already told you."
He rolled me onto my back and centered me on the narrow table top, leaving my legs unsupported. As I had done for Tom a few hours before, I let them hang, gripping the edges of the table to ease the strain on my back.
Len knocked my knees apart and knelt between them, kissing the tender flesh of my labia. He made no effort to avoid the hair that covered them, but kissed through it, the bristly spears tickling me at the same time the pressure of his lips thrilled me.
"Oooh, I do like that!" I whispered, willing to postpone my revenge for his brutality.
With an effort, I lifted my knees and caught them with my hands. Spreading them, I opened my cunt to him. He kissed the soft flesh repeatedly, while the fat rolls swelled and parted moistly. The tip of his tongue played over puffy inner surfaces. Tingling needles of pleasure warmed me and I blew softly between puckered lips. He laid his hands on my hips and nuzzled the sensitive slopes of my gash. Moaning happily, I let my hips jerk and my feet wave. My hands tired, but I let go of my knees and grabbed my thighs in the hollows behind the knees, then let my calves rest on the backs of my hands and hold them in place.
Len turned out to be a master of eating pussy. He caught small pinches of flesh between his lips and sucked gently, bringing the blood to the surface and arousing delightful pulses of sensation. He tightened the tip of his tongue to a point and ran it along nerve paths. And as my labia continued to swell and spread apart, he dabbed his tongue deeper and deeper.
Through the rising tide of my excitement, I sensed a strange restlessness of his fingers. They seemed to grope at the writhing flesh of my hips, and I felt them tremble as they probed into the softer rolls. His tongue jabbed faster, as well, and his lips seemed to gulp. At last, he began to whimper, sounding like an eager puppy.
I dismissed his curious behavior from my mind, engrossed in the marvelous heat that was welling in my cunt. As if to supplement that heat, the rays of the sun bathed my hunched body. Perspiration oozed from my pores and the contact zone where my knees pressed the outer slopes of my boobs grew sticky. I panted erratically. The pleasure was so intense I had to roll my head from side to side, and I kept uttering little mews of delight.
Len jerked back, his face flushed and sweat rolling from his jaw. "Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "Oh, shit, Mona!"
"What's wrong, Lenny?" I asked.
"It's a thing with me." He groaned. "Remember how many times you came yesterday before I finally did?"
"God, yes! How did you hold off so long?"
"I didn't. I mean, I couldn't make it! Takes pussy in my face to get it on for me."
"Nothing wrong with that," I told him softly. "I wish you knew what you're making me feel like right now!"
"Good, huh?"
"Jesus, honey! Better than good!"
He brightened. "Eating pussy. As if I didn't have what it took to ball a broad." He mused. "Gotta let a broad know you're a man before you start, or she'll think you're some kind of queer."
"Let her know by beating the shit out of her?"
"Gives her the idea." He pulled me off the table.
"Come on. It's better on a bed."
"Okay."
He positioned me in the middle of the huge bed and stared down at me for a moment. "Christ, what a picture!" he exclaimed. "That ivory skin and black hair! Like in a cameo against that spread!"
I understood. The spread was a rich, royal-blue velveteen, and I remembered other men who had flipped over such contrasts.
Len grinned ashamedly. "Used to play a trumpet," he said. "Gold. Had a case with blue velvet lining it. Goddamn horn looked like a treasure in that case. Same way with you."
He flung himself over me then. He straddled my chest and buried his face in my pussy, wallowing it so his nose burrowed into my cuntmouth and his cheeks scrubbed the inner slopes of my labia. His chin rode momentarily on my clitoris, and I grabbed his asscheeks and cried out as my knees sprang as far apart as they could go. He wasn't lying on me. His cock dragged between my boobs, but he held himself off me. His elbows were propped against the bed and he laid his hands on the inner sides of my thighs and pushed, keeping my pussy tightly spread.
His abandoned wallowing charged me with renewed excitement and my position enabled me to jerk my hips up and down. I clung to his ass, squeezing and caressing until his hips moved as fast as mine. His cock flopped around. The oozing fluid that came from his slit soon coated my chest, and the fat bulb slid around with a delicious, slippery feeling. His balls still hung low, bumping my tits as they swung from side to side.
In a few minutes, he seemed to regain a measure of self-control and started his slow, tantalizing tonguing again. When I jerked my knees toward me, he captured my thighs under his upper arms, freeing his hands. His fingers clawed at my labia and pulled them painfully flat. The move laid the floor of my gash wide open and I felt the rim of my cuntmouth gape. From time to time, he slipped his tongue through the quivering hold and lapped at the throat of my vagina. Great shudders racked me when he did that and I felt myself edging toward orgasm.
I thought he'd forgotten about my clitoris, but a moment came when he withdrew his tongue from the vicinity of my cuntmouth and closed his lips over the hooded lump. I gasped involuntarily and thrust my thighs against his arms. The push drove my pussy into the air and jammed my clitoris into his mouth. He sucked quietly while great waves of excitement surged through me.
He released the throbbing roll of cartilage briefly and stripped back the hood with his fingers. Holding the loose flesh clear, he gulped at the naked, rigid little prick and caressed the tip with his tongue.
The pleasure was too intense; it was the most exquisite form of torture. I shrieked, a sensation of sheer agony sweeping me. Continued sucking dulled the first needlelike sensations and produced fiery knives of delight. My belly churned. I thrashed back and forth between his trembling thighs while his arms thwarted my desperate efforts to free my legs.
I knew I was going to come, but the warning words got lost in torrents of delirious nonsense syllables. As if he recognized my state, Len sank onto me. He pinned my body to the bed and his cock pressed to my chest, housed in the broad valley between my boobs. Beside myself with excitement, I thrust the heels of my hands against the outer bulges and made the inner slopes squeeze the fat cylinder. At the sudden, damp heat on his cock, Len began pumping. My tits formed a soft-walled cunt for the surging cock and he sucked more fiercely. His tongue felt like sandpaper on the tip of my clitoris; every stroke wrenched me savagely. My belly knotted and furious spasms seized the backs of my thighs.
When I came, it was a violent convulsion. My body went rigid, every limb pushing to extend itself. I jammed my hands against my boobs until the swollen mounds ached. Len's cock drove back and forth like a hot poker, dragging sticky, sweating flesh with it, and his pubic hair rubbed the ends of my nipples raw. I ground my teeth and moaned continuously while savage contractions churned my guts.
At last, mercifully, Len let go of my clitoris and the agonizing spasms subsided. But there was no pool of jism on my belly, Len sighed contentedly and rolled off me.
"Len?" I reached for him blindly. "Aren't you going to come, Len?"
"Yeah." He sounded confident and pleased. "Damn right! Got him primed."
He hitched himself toward the head of the bed, where he propped himself in a semireclining position. Catching me under the armpits, he dragged me onto him, face up. When my butt rested on his pubic hair and ground his hard-on against his belly, he thrust me erect.
"Get your feet under you, baby," he directed. Then, "No! Not your knees, your feet!"
I squatted over his prick. He shoved at it with one hand and held it vertically under me, his cockhead snugly against my cuntmouth. I lowered myself, my thighs shaking, and felt the thick bulb plow upward through the center of my belly. He gripped my hips and eased me up and down while the sliding friction changed to the weird sensation of perfectly lubricated slippage.
He raised me a fraction of an inch too high and his cockhead escaped the embrace of my cuntmouth. It tilted slightly and my anus sank onto it.
"Len! No, don't pull down! I'm on wrong!"
"Like hell, you stupid bitch! Where you think I want you?"
Before I realized his intention, he let go of my hips and grabbed my elbows. Pressing them tightly to my sides, he pulled down fiercely, and I felt my ass distend and sink slowly around the immovable cockhead.
I knew the agony of getting fucked in the ass. Len had reminded me only one day earlier. I knew the initial horrible burning sensation would go away and that I'd come again. But his contempt infuriated me. I struggled in vain. Inch by inch, I sank the length of his shaft, impaled in the ass and restrained by fingers like bands of steel.
He started snapping his hips viciously. I bounced, stroking his cock with my tight-clamped asshole as if I were masturbating him. My butt slapped his belly loudly every time I fell, and my boobs jounced so hard my own belly was getting slapped. My hair flew, a shimmering black cloud around my face. My thighs ached from the strain of the squatting position, but my knees were too sharply bent for me to free my feet and extend my legs.
I sobbed. "You brutal son of a bitch! I don't think you can come without hurting somebody!"
"You're right. That's where it's at, baby!"
Livid with rage, I began to use the springy tension in my legs to amplify my bouncing. Maybe I could break off his Goddamn cock. Every stroke excited me more and every increase of excitement enraged me further. It became immaterial that I might come again. All I cared about was punishing the bastard under me. When I heard his groans and felt his body begin to writhe between my feet I slammed even harder. And when the hot cum started welling into my gut I rained a savage flurry of blows on his cock.
He tried to stop me, but the strength seemed to have drained from his hands.
"You Goddamn slut! Quit that!" he yelled.
"Fuck you, man! Take it while you can get it!"
"I'm going to kill you, woman!" He stopped shouting and grunted, his orgasm intensified and prolonged by my persistent pumping.
When I felt him sag, I hurled myself from him. I risked death to detour past the couch and scoop my purse from under it, but there was no time for my clothes. Naked and terrified, I burst into the hall only inches ahead of his grasping hands. And I ran headlong into Corky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Len actually caught hold of my shoulder before he saw Corky. Then he let go and fell all over himself getting back into the vacant room, while I clung to Corky in terror.
"What the hell's going on!" demanded Corky. He held me at arm's length and surveyed my nakedness. "Hey, you look great! But the management would take a dim view of--"
"Oh, Corky, Corky! He... he was trying to kill me!"
Corky's face darkened. He stared blackly at the closed door and hesitated, then shrugged and led me into our own suite. Tom, lounging in one of the armchairs, gawked at me.
"Mom! What's-"
"Never mind," Corky muttered. "Go get a robe for her."
"Yeah! Sure, Dad!"
"Now. Tell me about it." Corky held me tightly.
I told him what had happened, glossing over the juicier parts. I mean, I couldn't hide the fact there had been some sex, and Corky knew me well enough to know I wasn't going to let a little force keep me from enjoying a fuck, but that didn't mean I had to go into detail. Tom came back with a robe while I was telling how I'd barely made it into the hall, and of course he had to know who was involved.
When I finished, Corky growled. "That bastard's got more than a swim coming. He's going to think the world fell in on him before the day's over."
Tom choked up. "Can I, Dad? Can I give it to him?"
"We'll see what develops. Honey, you'd better get dressed; we've only got about ten minutes before that meeting starts."
I dressed and repaired my makeup. We were the last ones to reach the lounge, and Emmett Murdock stood in the doorway.
"Can't see how this meeting concerns you," he said bruskly, "Yeah?" Corky glanced past him. "Does it concern Eadie?"
"I've got a feeling about her," Emmett admitted.
"Yeah, you have. Between your legs. Now, get your ass out of my way, unless you want to land on it."
Emmett hunched his shoulders. "Shelton, you're getting to be a pain. I don't like your attitude one damn bit!"
Corky smiled, but it was like a snake looking at a bird. "You got those diamonds?" he asked softly.
Emmett's expression was all the answer needed.
"Know who does?"
"Got my suspicions."
"They're not worth a cup of coffee."
Len called from inside. "Holding a caucus out there? I've got an air reservation for two hours from now. I suggest we get things started."
Emmett backed reluctantly out of our way and we went in. Corky treated Len to a long, chilling look and Len had the grace to squirm, but the three of us sat down, Corky on one side of me and Tom on the other. Emmett stalked to the window at the south end of the room and stared moodily at the city.
Brenda and Jerry huddled on one of the love seats and looked miserable. Carol slouched in an armchair glowering at the Simones. Eadie perched expectantly on the edge of an occasional chair, her glance darting from one to another.
Len cleared his throat. "Shouldn't take long.
Somebody here's got the merchandise for sale. I'm ready to look at it now." He paused. "I'm satisfied we've waited long enough; the interference we were worried about didn't materialize."
I didn't know what that meant, but Corky's expression gave me the idea he did.
After a lengthy wait, Len grunted. "Don't be bashful. Can't make a deal without getting a look at the merchandise."
Emmett turned around, a tortured expression twisting his features. "Go ahead, Jerry, you son of a bitch! Drag out the Goddamn diamonds."
"What! What the hell are you hinting, you big-mouthed prick?"
"You know! First night here, you swiped one of those diamonds from us! Yesterday and last night, you got away with both of the others! Haul them out and sell them, if you've got the guts!"
Jerry stood erect. He lacked Emmett's height and weight, but it appeared likely he would attack the bigger man on principle. "You've got nerve," he said bitterly. "Screwed us in Berne, to start with. And you've been putting up a smoke screen ever since we got here trying to make out somebody was stealing your share. Made it easy to hide the fact you were out to get the one we had, didn't it!"
"Now see here!" Emmett moved away from the window, fists clenched.
Len held up his hand. "Easy, easy. Looks like we've hit a hitch. Am I to understand you people don't have the diamonds?" His eyes narrowed and he shot a crafty glance at each of the men. "Or would you be trying to make me nervous so it'll be easier to jack up what I'll pay?"
Both men faced him. Their dejected attitudes told the story, Len showed no sign of concern.
"Let's take a minute for some sober reflection," he said. "I realize there are professionals in investigation who haven't come up with anything, but we have a rather simple situation, haven't we?"
Jerry sat down again and Emmett studied Len.
Len continued. "Okay. I represent a buyer. I've got money to buy the Brighton Diamonds. You Murdocks are supposed to have showed up here with three of the four. You Simones brought the fourth. Now, the Sheltons came at the invitation of Emmett Murdock. Caution on his part, I suppose. What about Miss Ferris? Who invited her?"
In the silence that followed, all of us stared at Eadie. Personally, I thought it was a cheap, underhanded trick to put her on the spot that way. But she seemed unshakeable.
"Well?" Len bored at the point. "You or your wife invite her, Murdock? No? What about you, Simone? Of course not. She invited herself." He glared at Eadie. "Know what? In my business, I've encountered Miss Ferris before. We've got four diamonds missing. I suggest we adjourn the meeting to Miss Ferris's suite. Wouldn't that be cozier, Miss Ferris?"
She stopped smiling and gave him a speculative stare. Her voice was husky when she replied--maybe sexy would be more accurate, considering the way Tom gulped. "A little crowded, I'd think. But if everybody wants to... " Despite my personal prejudice against Len, I wondered if he did know something about Eadie we didn't. She'd brought money; we knew that. But it could be camouflage, and she just might be a jewel thief. The chamois bag seemed more like a woman than a man. Most men, I corrected myself.
We milled around briefly, although everybody knew what Len had in mind.
Then, dropping his light attitude, he whirled on Eadie. "First time I ever ran into you, you were carrying a pretty little chamois bag. Every time our paths crossed, that bag showed up sooner or later. Where is it now, Miss Ferris?"
"Huh? What chamois bag?" She acted perturbed, which could have meant anything.
"We're not in the search warrant business," Len said. "Let's have a quick look around. Something tells me we're going to find a chamois bag with expensive stuff in it."
"Now wait a damn minute!" Eadie flared, then cooled. "Oh, what the hell! Go ahead and look."
The Murdocks and Simones conducted the search. They were disgustingly messy, but damn thorough. Eadie's rooms looked worse after they'd finished than they had the previous day. And she looked as if they'd kicked her in the belly. She set her jaw and watched them with stony composure. When they abandoned the search, she appeared to me to be as surprised as Len they'd found nothing.
Len was not only surprised, he was suddenly furious. He snarled. "Okay! Now, by God, let's take a look at the rest of the suites! Somebody's trying to hold out, and it's time we found out who!"
Corky sighed. "It's been a pretty good show, so far. Not productive, but entertaining. Now, my wife happens to have a chamois bag. Suppose you take a quick look at the diamonds and get on with the deal."
I knew what the Murdocks and Simones were thinking. They half suspected Corky and I had decided to grab the whole pie. But from past experience, they were reluctant to accuse us, and that unknown quantity in the affair appeared to make them extra cautious.
Len apparently guessed I had stolen the bag from Eadie's rooms. He moved toward me, his face working with rage and his mouth going silently. He found his voice. "You Goddamn meddling cunt!" he exclaimed.
Corky sucked in his breath sharply and moved. "Watch it!" he said in a low voice.
Len jerked around and there was a blur of motion. Len's hand dipped into the front of his shirt and came out with an ugly little automatic. Even as he swung it into line, Corky's hands connected. The flat edge of his left hand smashed Len's wrist and his right first landed on Len's chin with the report of a pistol shot. Len toppled backward, hitting the floor with a crash, twitching once, then lying as if dead.
Corky rubbed his knuckles and grinned savagely. "Anybody else got a kind word for Mona?" He waited for a time, then changed the subject. "Now, let's get on with it."
Emmett snorted. "You dumb shit! With the buyer's rep out like a light? You couldn't have screwed things up any worse if you'd tried!"
I thought Corky was going to hang one on him, too, but he just sneered at him. "Em, you're in a bad spot to call anyone dumb. Screwing Jerry and Brenda when you bought those diamonds. You got even more stupid coming through customs."
"Whaddya mean! We paid duty on them!"
"On diamonds, sure. Industrial quality, Em. You and Jerry, both."
"Oh, come on! You know those customs people aren't going to be taken in by that kind of cheating!"
Corky laughed abruptly. "I know it. But you thought you had one of them in your pocket, didn't you."
Em's face turned gray and Jerry looked like he was going to vomit.
Blandly, Corky continued. "They don't know for sure they got took. But they hear the Brighton Diamonds are in the country, and they do know they had a bad apple for a while. Fact is, they've heard there might be a deal going in San Diego right now. That's what everybody was worried about, isn't it. Len's boss had undercover people casing the place until last night, just to see if the federal people were around."
Emmett was breathing heavily. He refused to answer.
So Corky resumed. "Looked like the delay might give you a chance to improve your individual profits. The Simones stealing from the Murdocks and vice versa. Got out of hand, didn't it, Em?"
Emmett winced but still said nothing.
"And then Len and Eadie began to complicate things." Corky grinned at Eadie's sudden start, but he held his hand up to forestall her protest. "Len brought money and instructions. He brought along some unhealthy greed, I might add. Eadie, you brought money and instructions, too. Right?"
She smiled. "Well, yes. Yes, Corky, I did. No bidding, for one thing. A flat price for the four Brighton Diamonds, for another." The smile disappeared. "And a warning about getting intercepted after the deal's completed, if I can make one."
"Tell me, Eadie. Anybody offer you the diamonds? Anybody sound you out about your interest?"
Emmett interrupted. "How the hell could we? Nobody knew she was here for a buyer!"
"That's right." Jerry nodded.
But Eadie smiled again. "Matter of fact, I did get an offer to deliver them." She ignored the indignant gasps and extended her toe toward the motionless Len. "He was interested in selling them to me. We had a little disagreement about a buyer's ethical responsibilities."
"The dirty son of a bitch!" Emmett growled.
"What about legal responsibilities?" asked Corky. "Would it bother you to know the proper duty hadn't been paid?"
"Why should it? My job is to buy and deliver something. If I buy it in this country and deliver it in this country, I don't give a damn about customs. If that's a problem, it's not mine."
"Unless they confiscate the merchandise."
"That's a shadowy area. My client would take a dim view of my performance if I let that happen."
"Mm-hmm."
"On the other hand, he authorized me to spend a reasonable amount to avoid that if the problem should come up."
Corky nodded. "Eadie, I'm representing the Murdocks and Simones. Honey, why don't you lay those diamonds out so Eadie can see them?"
I did. Eadie was a cool one, but she gasped and her eyes got round when she saw those gorgeous stones.
"My God!" she exclaimed softly. "No wonder!"
"No wonder what?" I asked.
"No wonder I've got the kind of money I have!"
Corky brought us back to an even keel. "How much does your client mean to offer?"
"Four hundred thousand."
"Emmett? Jerry? You need to hold a conference?" Corky looked at them coldly.
They exchanged stricken glances.
"Christ, no!" replied Emmett. "Sold!"
"What about Conn?" asked Jerry.
Corky shrugged, "What about him? He blew the deal. Got too damn greedy. If he could have sold the diamonds to Eadie, he could have taken his boss' money back and reported he was outbid. Since he couldn't, he decided to take the diamonds back without paying you. Of course, he'd keep the money and say you'd been paid. By the time it leaked out you hadn't, he'd be safely out of the country--and rich."
"The money, Eadie." Emmett sounded hoarse. "What form is it in?"
"Cashier's checks. Four of them. A hundred thousand each. Acceptable?"
He fidgeted. "I'd have preferred currency."
Corky laughed humorlessly. "Sure. So you could cheat on your income tax. Too bad, Emmett. You're probably going to have to make things right with the Treasury Department for that misunderstanding in customs, too."
"Shit!" Emmett fished out a checkbook. "I'm going to make out a check for your services, Shelton. I guess you earned it."
Corky nodded gravely. "I guess we did. Oh, while we're pulling loose ends together... " He waited for the check and pocketed it, then continued. "About all those bumps on the head. You keep slugging people on the back of the head that way, Emmett, you're going to wind up staring a murder rap in the face."
Emmett winced without denying Corky's charge.
Corky added, "Conn is a professional. He can sap a person neatly, and they get well in a hurry."
I don't think any of us realized what was coming. Emmett was stuffing three of the cashier's checks into his pocket when Jerry hit him. Jerry's arm disappeared halfway to his elbow in Emmett's gut, and his other fist caught Emmett full on the nose while the big man was still caving in. Carol stared at her husband without saying a word, then finally looked up at Jerry.
"I guess he had it coming." She sighed. "But I wish you hadn't hit him quite so hard."
Jerry stared from the fallen man to his own fist with an air of disbelief. "Good thing we got this," he remarked, looking at the one cashier's check Corky had handed him. "I think I broke my wrist. No tooth-pulling for a while." Then, slanting an awed glance at Emmett's unconscious figure again, "I hope I'm not where he can see me when he comes to!"
Corky and Jerry carried Len to his own suite and dumped him on his bed. Len would begin to stir in an hour or so... his concussion would keep him confused for a time, but it would wear off. Carol stayed with Emmett, whose three hundred thousand dollars would probably soothe his battered feelings. Eadie went back to our suite with us. She carried one dress, a simple, innocent-lined thing cut for a half-developed girl.
She changed her clothes in my bedroom. With a Band-aid across each nipple and no bra, she managed to crowd into the dress. We combed her hair out, teased it a little, then combed it again, and she was no longer Eadie Ferris; she was a sweet, innocent-eyed child with too much makeup. I corrected that, and we went into the living room.
Tom gasped and stared. "Gawd! Is it really you, Eadie?"
Corky arrived and began to chuckle. "Okay, kids. Here's a pair of tickets to Sea World. Here's money for the cab, Tom, and some to spend while you're there. Mona, better let Eadie take that woven purse of yours--you know, the little girl one. When you kids get down to the fifth floor, you can get on the elevator. Not before; they're watching it when the lights show it's coming down from the eighth floor. Just act like the kids you look like. Hold hands and pay attention to each other, not anybody else. Mom and I will be down there to be sure everything goes okay."
Eadie crossed to Corky and kissed him on the mouth. "Thanks, Corky, my client will mail you a check."
"You'll go to the airport from Sea World?" he asked.
She shook her head and smiled. "If you'll call this number for me and say the kids are living it up at Sea World, my client will pick me up there."
Corky gulped. "My God! He's right here in town?"
"Wouldn't you be if you had that amount of money riding on four diamonds?"
I got the woven purse and Eadie laid the chamois bag on the bottom, then dumped the contents of her own handbag into it.
She dimpled at Tom. "Ready?"
"Yeah!" His eyes were still round.
We went down on the elevator the moment they left. There was a grim little knot of people in one corner of the lobby. Jerry and Brenda were angrily accompanying three soberly dressed men into the office, their luggage showing they were preparing to check out.
"Feds?" I whispered.
Corky nodded and grinned. "Can't hang anything on them, and Jerry won't talk. But he'll settle for the extra duty, just to be on the safe side." He glanced with obvious distaste at another man who stood out because he was so discreetly dressed. "Bastards really would rather get their hands on the stones. Confiscate them for improper declaration. They're going to be pissed off when they come up empty-handed."
The discreet type, who had eyed us suspiciously when we got off the elevator and was still keeping his eye on us, glanced at the floor indicator lights above the door. I looked, too, and saw the 5 light up" A few moments later, the door hissed open and a radiant pair of kids came out. They held hands tightly and gazed into each other's eyes with a devotion that brought a lump to my throat. The fact was, they weren't acting.
As if they'd seen us by accident, they approached us. I sensed Corky's sudden tension.
"Excuse us, mister." The girl fluttered her eyelashes at Corky. "Do you know whether Sea World stays open until six o'clock?"
"Umm... seven, I think."
She turned to stare soulfully at the boy, who was almost as tall as Corky. "Well, gee. At least we can stay until six, huh."
The boy grinned and squeezed her hand. "You bet!"
They took off, and everybody in sight smiled nostalgically--even the Fed. "Honey?"
"Yeah?" He looked down at me with a gentle expression.
"How come Len knocked her out and hid her?"
"He had to get her out of circulation for a while. After she refused to deal with him--gave him the bit on ethics--he probably began to think she had an idea who was swiping the diamonds. He didn't want her spilling that, and he didn't want her to make an offer to the Murdocks and Simones."
"And hiding the chamois bag in her suite? That was insurance?"
"Sure. If she did show up, that bag in her closet would discredit her. I'm afraid he read Murdock's character pretty well. He knew the damn fool wouldn't believe Eadie when she claimed it was a frame-up."
"And it was Emmett who slugged Len?"
"Yeah. When he couldn't find that last diamond in Jerry's suite--you know, when he got one out of Jerry's bar--it must have occurred to him Len had something to gain by stealing it. So he had a look. It was Len's bad luck he came in before Emmett could get out."
"Honey, I don't think I like Emmett at all! Let's not do any more work for him."
"I'm with you, puss." He grinned. "Between income tax and making up that false declaration to customs, he's going to have a lot of explaining to do. It's going to take a hell of a bite out of what he got from Eadie."
We waited a while longer, pretended to become impatient, and finally wandered away from our watcher. He acted as if he were torn between a desire to follow us and a more urgent need to remain near the elevator. When we had gotten out of his sight, Corky stopped at one of the pay telephones. He dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number Eadie had given him.
"Hello? Hello! I just called to tell you the kids are living it up for the afternoon. Yes. Well, they'll be coming out later; plan to take in Sea World for a while around six. Right. You're welcome."
"Weirdest damn conversation I ever heard," I told him when he hung up.
He chuckled gently. "Yeah." He gazed at the pool for a time. "Too bad," he remarked.
"What's too bad?"
"Too bad they don't have rooms to rent at Sea World. The kids could live it up a lot better if they did."
"Honey!"
"Speaking of living it up, we've got a whole suite up there going to waste!" He ran his glance boldly over me.
"Come on, then!" I grabbed his hand and we ran toward the elevator.
