Chapter 5
The apartment was silent when Julia reached home. She kicked off her maid's flats and tiptoed barefoot to her bedroom. She was certain her father must still be out cold from his Sunday night fling and she passed his partly opened door with barely a glance at the darkness in the room beyond. There was no place in her mind for thoughts about her father's diverting from his usual habits in sleeping it off and leaving the door ajar.
Just beyond the fringe of light from the hallway, Bart Cochran watched the girl pass en route to her room. He had slept fitfully after Vivien left. As she passed his doorway he saw her fingering under her golden hair for the zipper to her uniform.
"Wonder how many men have done that for her this morning," he muttered, listening to her door close down the hall. He stepped to the corridor and, unconcerned that he was naked, moved to a window to study the snapshot for the hundredth time. It was the hand in the picture, more than the full-bodied view of the man and woman in climax, that roused him. He knew that hand belonged to the girl in the next room. A girl he never had really thought of as his daughter from the time of Vivien's pregnancy.
It had been some other male who fathered the bewitching blonde, Cochran was sure. Only a month before Vivien announced she was pregnant, the two had had a fertility test at his wife's request. She'd been desperate for a child and after four years of childlessness, he had yielded and gone to the clinic for a check of his sperm vitality.
"It's a motility problem, Mister Cochran," the clinician had said, summing it up in separate meetings-with Vivien first, and Bart a day later.
"You aren't infertile, but the chance of your procreating are slim."
He never had forgotten the way that conference went. The female doctor couldn't have given him more welcome news, and he barely listened as she went on with the reassurance that even if his sperm count indicates sub-fertility, he needn't think it made him one bit less a man.
He had had no such thought from the moment he had come to the clinic and caught sight of its petite, curvaceous director. She was woman ... a pretty and an eager woman. He was man-all man. From the first glance, she was a potential conquest and even more a challenge than many of the hot cunts he served as room waiter at the resort. This one was a professional, a doctor. He himself was only a tradesman.
When an over-attentive male lab assistant had taken him to the sterile, white-tiled cubicle of a room and told him to masturbate a sperm sampling for the test, Cochran had refused and demanded to see the clinic director.
The doctor wasn't the least bit shocked at his indignation with her gay assistant. "You'd be surprised how many of our customers he can help," she had laughed when he finished his tirade. "But he offended you and that doesn't get us our sample, does it?"
"Sure as hell doesn't!" he had agreed, "and I'm not much at this kind of frigging."
The little sexpot was a very accommodating medic. "Well now, Mister Cochran, we're both on a spot then, aren't we? I have to get your semen specimen, and you have to have motivation. So let's get on with both."
Bart recalled his astonishment as the small, but beautifully proportioned woman, who seemed far too young to be a doctor, calmly stepped between his knees and felt for his wrist as he sat on the edge of the high, clinic type, treatment table.
"Pulse," she ordered matter-of-factly, watching his crotch as she took the count.
"Better pulse here," she said unemotionally when his uncontrollable penis suddenly lunged along the inseam of his trousers. Without raising her eyes to ask his permission, the woman opened his fly and extracted the hard-on. "That's a very unusual phallus," she said, bending close to inspect its truncheon thickness.
Cochran remembered wondering how she could be so totally female while wearing a shapeless white cloak and a mannish hair style.
"An unusual phallus, like you say, doc!" he had told her, feeling his self-control fading at the sight of her fixed stare at his organ. "So what can we do about what we both want?"
Her hand slipped across his thigh to clasp his throbbing cock and she closed her eyes as she tugged it. For several silent seconds she massaged the horny tissue and seemed to be speculating on her next move. He had hoped that at the very least she would personally frig him for the test sampling.
"You hold this in this hand," she had said suddenly, forcing a glass vial into his hand. "And this in the other!" She grabbed his free hand and wrapped his fingers around the hot cock.
"Now!" She had spun away from the table, unbuttoning as she moved. "Think of what you might like to do if you could fit that much man into little me," she had said softly, dropping the clinic coat and displaying a tawny, tantalizingly nude body. He had stared in disbelief that she had dared to go naked beneath her lab cloak. Her pert breasts had stuck out tempestuously, tantalizingly. The rest of the woman was a lithe, torrid tease as she strolled, completely at ease, around the treatment table and then turned to face the wall. Then it hit him. It was a deliberate technique to get what she wanted in the little bottle-a regular routine for reluctant males.
She had read his thoughts. "You'd be surprised," she said. "At least ten per cent of the men claim not to masturbate. I have to encourage them to."
He had begun to pump himself as he gaped at the inflaming figure, but soon he had the feeling that for all her cool disinterest when she posed for him as she did for other clinic visitors, she had something special going for him. She turned to give him full side profile of her eager body, and when he caught her look, her glance taunted him.
"It would help some if you'd kind of move around a little ... like ... you know..." he had told her.
She responded immediately and with a perceptible roll of her hips, moved from her wall position to stroll around the cot.
"Beautiful!" he had told her, twisting to watch her movement and seeing her eyes seem to glaze as she looked again at his prick.
"Tell me what you see," she urged. "Maybe that'll help you come."
"Wouldn't dare," he panted.
"Try anyway."
"Baby, you wanna really know? I'll tell you all right! I see a sexpot doctor, nutty for my cock, walkin' around beggin' for it!"
"And why aren't I getting it?" cooed the voice.
"Only because it would split your cute little chassis right down the middle." His hand was pumping furiously.
"Want to know what I see?" the sultry voice of the teaser asked. "I see a crazy, thick muscle that looks as wide as it is long. And you know what else? I see a man jerking it off right in my face because it's what he's always wanted to do-to come right in a girl's face while she's watching."
"Yes!" he screamed. "I have! I have!"
Just as the ejaculation flew and the first wild drops splattered on her delighted face, the doctor seized the hand holding the vial and forced him to cover his discharging penis and capture the spraying come. The instant the orgasm passed, she took the vial from his hand and turned very professionally away.
"Thank you," she said coolly. "That will be all."
But if she had meant him to accept that as her dismissal, she had underrated him, he recalled. He remembered staring at the saucy tail that was turned toward him as the still-naked female busied herself putting the plastic stopped on top of the glass containing his contribution to the fertility research.
He could see the scene again. He slid from the edge of the firm black mattress that lay on top of the treatment table. It was the sound of his ripping the sanitized paper sheeting from the mattress that had made her swing to look at him.
"Mister Cochran!" The professionalism had left her voice and she barely had time to put the vial at the sink edge before he dragged her against his front.
"Tell you what, doc," he had taunted her, spinning her against the cot table, "let's just see if you can take this much man!"
"No!" Her protest was shrill, but low-voiced enough not to be heard outside. It had told him that the woman wanted exactly what he wanted.
There was no waiting left in him. With a low-throated growl, he twisted the suddenly incoherent sizzler across the edge of the Naugahyde mattress. Her arms reached high over her head and for a moment he was sure she was about to start a clawing counterattack. Instead, her hands clawed for the metal rim under the mattress at the opposite side.
He gaped at the sight of the medic gone out of control. Her deeply arched position made her perky boobs poke animatedly in open invitation. Her nipples were jutting cones of sex fever run wild.
"Do it!" she gasped. "You have to-so do it!"
He had driven his muscle far into the snug vagina, savagely inflamed as tight muscles gripped the sidewalls of his pulsing tube. The friction of her smallness made him even more demanding.
"Yes!" she hissed. "All of you! All!"
The woman was in coital frenzy, head and shoulders, breasts and hips and especially the sweet cunt, all involved in her writhing surrender. He felt her thighs, which had spread to admit him, pressing tightly to trap his shaft far inside her love tunnel. At that second her passion-cry spilled from her lips and her whole body trembled, then stiffened as the orgasm seized her.
"I ... I'm coming ... I ... ohhh!"
His ejaculation spurted from his body in a hot barrage and a moment later he sagged across her body, holding her pinned against the thin mattress, afraid of her verbal tirade attack once her spasms slowed.
There had been none. She remained motionless in his arms and seemed totally oblivious to the awkward positioning of her body. "Do you want to know something?" she had asked finally. "You are the first patient ever to do that to me." Her arms circled his neck and she pressed a kiss to his lips. "Thank you."
He had never really believed her, but her gratitude was like music. Better yet, Vivien herself had put him in a spot, wanting to have the baby, and when later that day he heard the sexy little doctor tell his wife she'd need more tests on her husband, he got the message.
They had met in the tiny cubicle of an examination room and he had stretched her tight pussy several times a week for the next two months. Nothing for Vivien-just the clinic's report at the end of eight weeks that one Bart Cochran was almost azoospermic.
"What does it mean, Bart?" Vivien had asked him tearfully.
Vivien was broken-hearted and for a week Bart had interrupted the trips to the clinic doctor to build his wife's morale. Some weeks later, Vivien's announcement of her pregnancy had come as sheer disaster. "You can't be!" he exploded at the redhead. "The clinic says I haven't got it in the semen to give you a child."
"Oh, Bart!" Vivien had chided. "I checked with the lab a week ago. You aren't azoo-whatever you called it! At least, not all the time. The doctor was so cute-she told me to tell my husband to stay at home and practice lots. It'd improve."
"The lab said that? You mean the director?" he demanded.
She nodded happily and Bart abruptly got the message from his little doctor. The call from Vivien had given the woman an out. He was sure she had found another horny male whose shape pleased her more than his. He'd seen some bastard in the waiting room on his last three trips. But it didn't explain how his wife had gotten herself with child. There had to be another guy.
That same night he had begun his affair with the vodka and from then on it was downhill between them. He never had made an open accusation, but he always had felt certain that while she talked excitedly about "his" child, the baby in Vivien's belly had been put there by another man.
And now that baby was quite the girl! He was back in the darkness of his room, hearing sounds in her bedroom as Julia followed her usual routine after a housekeeping morning. Bart knew that, first of all, she'd strip to the buff and pull one of her nearly transparent shortie negligees over her shoulders for the trip to the kitchen. When he'd complained about her nakedness to Vivien, his wife had shushed him.
"Let her alone, Bart!" she'd insisted. "She's just come home from a girl's school and we're her family. Let her be natural here, at least."
Until his discovery of that photo earlier in the morning, he had made an uncomfortable surrender to her informality. More than once he had had far from fatherly feelings about the eighteen-year-old, but he'd been able to force them from his mind by intensifying his attack on the Smirnoff.
Now, still holding the Polaroid print, he stood in the darkness of his room, waiting for her door to open. A vast, bubbling flood churned deep inside as he imagined the way she must have looked when the picture was taken ... the way he'd see her in a minute or two when she made her usual parade to the kitchen.
Five minutes passed. Ten ... twenty, and still no sound of an opening door. Something had altered the pattern, and now he was at the end of his patience. He moved to the hall and hesitated a moment, looking down his frame at the unrelenting bar of trembling cock ramrodding from his groin. There was no trace of the usual Monday hangover left. Anticipation of what he was going to do had him completely sobered.
"Get good and clean, Julia, dear," he murmured to himself when the sound of running water in the bathroom reached him.
Alone in her room, Julia had felt the sweep of mixed emotions over the catastrophic events of the morning. Her own actions, which had once seemed horrible and betraying beyond all forgiveness, now seemed mild in contrast to what she had seen in her mother. She wondered how long Sherman Wilson had had her mother for his kept woman. She wondered if the unexplained drinking of her father had its explanation in something he knew about his wife. A wave of compassion went through her for the man down the hall.
She thought of her parents' separate bedrooms and wondered what came first-Daddy's bottle or Mummy's outside love life.
Briefly she considered the emptiness in her tummy and thought about a trip to the kitchen for a sandwich. The bath sounded like a better idea in consideration of what she had been through. In spite of the rage she felt when she thought of those two she'd left playing in Wilson's apartment, she envied them. There was something so abandoned, so sexually good in their responses to each other. It occurred to her as she began to run water into the tub that maybe she'd been judging everyone too harshly. Perhaps her mother had only been trying to protect her till the right moment. Julia wondered. Sherman Wilson had convinced her mother that the moment was at hand ... that her daughter was ready.
Ready for what? she wondered. Ready for the grow-up cocks that seemed to spring from the most unlikely bods around the Buccaneer? Ready for a new standard of behavior now that she was fully female? Maybe the whole world turned around when a girl became a woman...
She smiled at her reflection in the door-length mirror outside her bathroom. "Not bad, Julia baby!" she whispered, stretching her arms high above her head, watching her breasts surge in happy freedom from the bra.
Down the hall, minutes had become hours for an impatient Bart. He had decided there was no time for delay. He knew his own courage had a low ceiling and there was always the chance that what he had to do could be interrupted by an early return by Vivien.
Barefooted, he moved quietly down the corridor rug, then hesitated at the closed door to her room. Once he turned that handle and entered the room, he knew he was committed. He looked down at the picture in his hand, and the sight of her fingers reaching for the man in that photo ended his hesitancy. He wanted those fingers doing the same for him.
He opened her door just as Julia closed the bathroom door behind her and knelt to shut off the water running into the tub. In one second she would be into her bath and it could be too late. He had to move-now! Hurrying across the room, he tore open the door and stood, bold and spread-legged, at the threshold, staring at the intoxicating, cock-crazing creature bent across the tub as she tightened a faucet.
At the sound of the door opening, Julia twisted and looked in stunned surprise. For a disbelieving second her eyes went wide at the boldness of her father's naked body and at the leaping hardness of his cock. It seemed to be aimed straight at her, and when he saw her glance dart down his front, her father seized the shaft and waved it like a pendulum.
There was sheer lust in his face when she looked up and he leered happily at her. "Got something for you," he announced. "Got the idea from this." He waved the Polaroid print at her-and instantly Julia knew. It had been the first thing she'd looked for on her return from work, and it was gone. Till now she had thought her mother had found it.
"Give me that," she said, rising and advancing. A seething anger stormed inside her, but as she saw his expression of animal wanting, something was shattered in her. This was the man who was supposed to be her father, and for all his drinking, for all his previous disinterest in his daughter, he had been different from other men. Till now!
The sum total of all her sexual shocks seemed wrapped in his jutting prick. This mystery man who had wanted nothing to do with her since she could remember, now obviously wanted to do everything.
A weirdly uncontrollable erotic feeling swept her as she moved, stepping so close that his grotesquely swollen crown nudged against her tense tummy muscles. Making no effort to avoid the contact, she took the snapshot and held it to the light over the sink. The hot cock shaft slid across her front and now the dark knob rubbed against the curve of her hip. Pretending to ignore the tantalizing touch, she looked down from her study of the picture into her father's eyes. "What do you think was happening, Daddy?"
"You know what was happening!" he rasped, apparently hoping she would make some overt move-clasp his hard-on or give him open invitation.
"Tell me," she insisted. "I want to know what you think my hand was doing in the picture."
"Plain as day!" he snorted, and she could see he was tortured by her calm. "You were having yourself a little orgy with some of the guests."
She handed the picture back and with a disdainful shrug, turned her back on him and leaned across the edge of the tub to turn the faucet again. "It's nice for a girl to know what her daddy thinks of her," she said.
She saw him gaping open-mouthed at her golden body with the little expanse of white where the bikini had shaded her saucy ass from the sun, and she knew he read it as an invitation.
"No daughter o' mine, baby!" he spit explosively. A quick step and his hands were on her hips, his penis thundering against the cushion of her ass cheeks.
Julia's body froze the instant she felt his sweaty palms and simultaneously the hot shaft crowding along the cleft of her tail. He wouldn't! That was crazy story-book pretense. A man couldn't take a woman that way! She writhed against his grasp and the clamp of his fingers on the curve of her hips tightened. Then the man she had ceased to think of as her father backed a few inches away from her, and briefly Julia was hopeful he had come to his senses. Then it was back, this time pressing head-on and nudging insistently against her crease.
"Daddy, no! Not like that!"
"like that, baby-take it!" He reamed against the resistance just inside her anal cleft. As she felt the immediate clutch of her sphincter muscles, she screamed in helpless protest at the rutting attack and tumbled to her knees on the bathroom rug. The man was with her all the way, clawing, shoving himself, refusing to be dislodged and panting wildly as he rode her to the floor.
"Don't!" Julia screeched. "You'll kill me!"
"The hell you say! You love it!" His next thrust drove her to her belly and now he was straddled on her buttocks, ramming frenziedly to bury more of his unyielding prick. Sobbing, Julia flailed angry fists against the rug as she felt his penetration deepen.
"Let me ride...! " he yelped, driving his hands under her body and grabbing for her breasts.
"You do want it, you little bitch!" he snarled, humping at her backside as he strummed her sensitive and now frantically aroused buds.
Suddenly the pain that seemed about to split her spine, the hurt that seered from her back to her brain, turned to rapture. She was locked in orgasmic frenzy almost immediately, writhing, and she could not help heaving her rear against the spearing cock, forcing for the climax.
His ejaculation stormed into the anal passage that had admitted only half his shaft and as she felt the volcanic flood sizzle into her she was engulfed by her own orgasm.
"Yes, Daddy, do me harder!" It felt to her as if her finger-tortured breasts would spring from her front as lust-laden lightning bolts streaked to every nerve of her body. Whether from the absence of any father love from this man or from her own hyper-sexuality, what he had started in her in those seconds refused to slow.
He dragged himself away, and, stumbling to his feet, stared down at her as she fell to the floor.
"I want, big daddy..." Julia mumbled, as though clutching and unclutching an imaginary prick.
His own orgasm had been a brief burst and the sight of the girl caught in a sex frenzy fired him for full action. Turning to the sink, he washed himself hastily while Julia continued to grind her front against the soft throw-rug. She seemed almost incoherent.
He bent and seized under her armpits, half-dragging, half-carrying the nearly delirious girl to her bed.
"I ... cuh ... can't. . . Daddy ... make me come good!"
He rolled her to her back and sprawled between her legs. If her need was out of control, Bart's was more demanding. With bullish impatience, he pulled at the fingers she had driven through her cunty cleft to torture her clitty. Inflamed by her still spasming frame, he stuffed his swollen prick through her moist quim lips.
It was every bit the heaven he had dreamed through the hours of plotting for her body. Tight vaginal muscles wrapped and tortured his pistoning spike with almost the same resistance he had felt at her rear. But the resistance was her size, not her will, and it was obvious in the frenzied response of her pelvic thrusting that Julia wanted everything he could give. Even before he was fully thrusting, Cochran felt himself about to come.
"Goddamnit, girl, slow down!"
It was like screeching at the tide.
"I. . . I. . . Ohhh, stuff me!"
He slowed his own inner frenzy, stopping the erratic humping and now inching gradually through the sweet tunnel till his mound was flush against hers. Then he stopped all motion.
"You're a bug on a pin!" he whispered hoarsely, enjoying her agony at his holding the finale. "You're caught at last, Julia-caught on my prick. Squirm, baby doll!"
She wriggled helplessly against the torture and pleaded for the mercy. Deeper and more penetrating her running spunk spasms raced till the wild heat of her burned through and claimed his self-control. With a helpless cry, he let his climax fly.
It was over. Realizing he had just dared to do what could never be forgiven, Cochran waited for her, lying at his side, to say something that would clue him to her mood. For long minutes there was no sound as she lay motionless, eyes closed, breasts rising and falling gently. He stared at her face and saw a radiant, sensual quality there that told him whatever the aftermath might be, she had loved their swinging. Still silent, she rolled to her side, then stood from the bed and looked pensively at him.
"Didn't you get enough?" she asked, turning to mm go to the bathroom.
"Did you?" he demanded.
"They call it incest," she observed quietly.
"Bullshit!" Bart snorted. "It's not!"
So there it was at last, thought Julia. The man didn't even consider himself her father. It made absolutely no sense, even if his behavior since she could first remember indicated he didn't want to be her father. But that was ridiculous. She closed the bathroom door and glanced in the mirror as she stood before the sink, seeing clear marks of resemblance. He had to be her natural father. Maybe denying it was his way of clearing his own conscience for what he had done to her-with her.
The door opened quietly and the man, whoever he was, stepped behind her and let his cock crown nudge at the cleft of her ass cheeks.
"I liked it there," she murmured, shoving suggestively against the spike. "And I think it's very wrong of me to like it."
"Call it education," Bart smirked. "I think it's time to learn more."
She shivered and shook her head in a determined negative. "Please, Daddy. I want to take a bath and ... and you don't know what you're starting."
"Bath? Let's both take a bath!"
For a frightened, uncertain second, Julia gripped the sides of the sink and debated whether she should run. But where was there to run? The whole world was waiting outside-a whole world of hard men just waiting for her to come out in the open where they could get to her. As she turned toward her father and took his hand, it almost seemed that this was the safest place to be. At least, this man would not deliberately harm her.
Together they slid into the tub and she let him entwine her legs and her arms with his, then slip that demanding third leg deep into her palpitating twat. Water splashed at the sides as he drove at her and she reflexed with mounting frenzy. Then the surge was on, and Julia felt the delicious sweep of her orgasm.
"You are quite the girl, young lady!" he exclaimed.
"You didn't come, did you?" she accused, feeling his flesh pole still hard and deep in her body.
"How did you know?" he replied, running a fingertip across the glistening smoothness of her shoulders, then tracing the outline of her breasts.
"You didn't let it fly inside me," she answered, resting against the slope of the back of the tub and letting her head loll against the tile edge.
Bart stared at the breathtaking beauty of the girl. She appeared to be sleeping, her long eyelashes closed, her lips parted slightly. For tortured minutes he studied the voluptuous wonder of the form cemented to him at the meeting of their legs. It was plain that Julia loved the sex act. . . and ... more was plain as well. For the first time in years, he was looking directly into her face at close range. There was no denying it. The eyebrows and the nose ... even the chin line. Julia bore an unmistakable resemblance to him. He now knew he was what she called him-her father!
Her eyes sprang open and he looked into wide saucers that seemed now more black than brown. "I wish I knew how," she said.
"How what?"
"How to make my mystery muscles work."
"Whaddaya mean, mystery muscles?" he demanded gruffly, hoping the fear that shot through him at the certainty that she was his daughter didn't show.
She was mounted across his thighs, her legs snuggled close to his sides in the narrow tub and for all the shock he felt, his phallus had remained iron-hard in the tight tunnel.
"I mean, if I knew anything, I could use some tricks inside me to make you shoot your cum." She squirmed against his legs. "Then you wouldn't have to heave up from the bottom to make us do it."
A new fear knifed him at her admission of sexual innocence. "Level with me, little girl," he chuckled with pretended casualness. He urged his buried prick to a fresh attack to encourage her to say what he wanted to hear. "You've been getting cock in this sweet cunt for years now."
Her head moved from side to side as she felt the slow, seductive thrusts stuffing the man deeper and deeper. "I really haven't, Daddy, honest." She writhed in what appeared to be happy abandon. "Those two made me take that picture in one of the honeymoon lodges and ... and I had my very first man this morning. Now I've had you this afternoon ... and ... oohhh, Daddy!. . . I ... I can't talk..."
Delirious with the certainty that she was telling the truth, he felt new guilt as the awareness of his action sank home. Sealed snugly to his body, her pussy frenzied by his shaft, he fought to stop the onset of his orgasm. He realized that no lewd picture-taking, no other man, no other anything, could accomplish in Julia what the wild rush of his lustful sperm bolts would.
"Naw ... . no! NO!" he screamed as he felt himself going.
"Yes, Daddy ... YES!" she squealed in happy frenzy. Her whole frame vibrated as the full climax claimed her and held her helpless while its shock waves swept her. Again her head lolled back against the edge of the porcelain and this time her eyes were open and staring at an unseen world as she crested.
"Ohhh, baby ... I ... I'm...! " His ejaculation ran wild as he ramrodded his uncontrollable cock deep against the flesh which held it and let the guilty geyser soar.
The instant he had finished, his prick began to soften and he urged himself against the girl's body. She seemed to catch his meaning and gave a little whimper of disappointment as the organ slipped from her pit.
"Thank you," she murmured when Bart stepped from the tub. For an uncomfortable second he stood undecided as to his next action. Every impulse whipped him to run for his bedroom and let the vodka anesthetize the chaos of his feelings.
"Let me dry you." She reached for a bath towel and he whirled to the door.
"Got to beat it," he said apologetically when he saw her hurt expression. "I'll do it myself." He snatched the towel from her hands and raced across her bedroom to the hall, leaving her staring at the trail of his wet footprints.
Her mind was playing tricks on her again, Julia told herself. Or was it? There was that initial assault when he stormed into the bathroom, then there was his violent denial when she had made the stupid crack about incest. That violence had torn the last restraint from her and she had let her want run wild. It was the natural her. But then, there at the last, something had happened to her father and he had wanted out.
Julia walked to her bedroom door and looked at the prints that ran from her room down the light carpeting of the corridor. What a very confusing man he was! The sound of a key turning in a lock at the front of the apartment jolted her thoughts and she closed her bedroom door quickly. As she crawled under the sheet, she heard her mother's voice call softly, "Julia."
Footsteps sounded in the hall and she braced for her door to open, hoping she could fake sleep. The steps stopped several feet away and she heard a puzzled exclamation. A few moments later the steps retreated and there was silence. The newest mystery was too much for her, and with a restless sigh, she surrendered to the happy escape of sleep.
In the kitchen, Vivien frowned at an empty coffee cup and crushed a half-smoked cigarette into the saucer. It couldn't happen, her intelligence insisted. But the footprints were there! Damp and vivid against the beige rug, Bart Cochran had left the clear sign of his visit to his daughter's room. A call that had been hastily terminated, judging by the close-spaced marks of his feet. He had been running. Running from Julia's outrage, or running because he heard the key in the front door?
"He wouldn't!" she breathed as alarm swept her. Vivien thought of the state the man was in that morning when she stepped into his bedroom and she knew that he would take the girl if he could.