Chapter 7

THE NEXT MORNING THEY SLEPT LATE, GET-ting up just before noon. Zoe was afraid that Jock would demand another sex orgy the minute he woke up, but he seemed sated for the time being. He perched on a bright stool and watched her as she cooked bacon and eggs, biscuits, and perked coffee.

While they were eating, she asked, "Would it be all right for me to hike around the place a little? I need to take walks-get exercise because of the baby, you know."

Jock reached across the table and patted her stomach. "How big is he by now, do you think? Does he grow a little every day?"

"Of course he does. When I eat, so does he." She repeated her question. "Do I have to stay in the house all the time, Jock?"

He stared at her. "Heavens no. Why should you? Go any place you want to. You're a Tawnley now. You can do as you please on Tawnley land."

"Darling, you know that's not true." She felt again the singeing heat of Link's anger, the menacing magnetism of him. "Your dad said I was to stay out of his way. And I mean to mind him."

"Okay." The boy waved a careless hand. "You can do that and have all the freedom you want too. Link's gone an awful lot You can take it easy when he's home, and then go wherever you take a notion to, even into the big house, while he's away."

She asked cautiously, "Jock, do you ... do you love me enough to let me tell you what a man in Wayside Corners said about this place?"

His eyes narrowed. But he said steadily, "Sure baby. Why not?"

"I feel like I've got to know if ... if any of the things he. said are true. It won't make any difference about my staying here-or my being glad that you love me and want me here with you. But it will let me know how to ... to feel about everything. Whether to feel lawful or ... or lawless."

The boy sat back in his chair, his forehead wrinkled in a troubled frown. "The guy cussed us out, did he?"

She nodded. And she told him all that the man in the bus station bad said about the Tawnleys and the feather farm.

When she had finished, he sat for a time without speaking. Then he said slowly, "Okay, you've told me and got it out of your system, baby. Now you can forget it, because not a goddamn bit of it is true. The guys in town don't like Link because he doesn't buddy with them. And they think Mendez is some kind of a crook because he's such a creep. But I know them both, as wall as a kid can know the men he lives with, and I'm as sure as hell that there's nothing illegal going on here."

She felt her heart suddenly singing. "Oh, God, Jock, I-I hope there isn't. But at Tutie Bear's trial, they talked about her helping Mendez in a smuggling racket."

"But they didn't do anything about it, did they? Hell, no-I Because they were just guessing that it existed. If there were any underhanded deals made by the guys on this ranch, the law would have caught up with them years ago, wouldn't it?"

"Well, yes, I suppose it would have."

He took one of her white hands and smoothed it between both of his brown ones. "Let me tell you about Link, baby. He and my mother weren't ever ... friends. Oh, I'm sure they must have been in love when they got married. And they must have screwed at least once; they had to, to get me. But something happened-I never knew what-when I was too little to understand man/woman feelings. And they were never congenial after I knew them. I can't remember their ever sleeping together-or ever even kissing each other. She lived in the north half of the house, and Link lived in the south half."

"How old were you when your mother died?"

"I was seven. And, the way I recall it now, Link never shed a tear, either here or at the church-or in the cemetery where she was buried. He never spoke her name again. If I hadn't read it on my birth certificate that I found in the attic one day, I'd never have remembered that it was Inez."

Zoe felt quick pain for the woman who would have been her mother-in-law, quick sympathy for the man who had fathered Jock. She said, "Link must have let their disagreements, whatever they were-and her death-sour his whole life. Does he ever let down his guard?"

"Oh, sure, lots of times-with me. And he will with you some day, after he learns to trust you. He thinks every woman is out to make every man unhappy, and it may take him quite a while to believe that you're as good as I know you are."

"Where does he go on all his trips V "To our retail outlets all over this country and down in Mexico. We've got a big string of businesses here, baby."

"I saw the buildings. What kind of businesses are they?"

"Well, the birds first and foremost, They bring in a fortune, shipped to shows and fights and for breeding. Then we've got a factory where the men make gift things out of feathers: imagine bouquets to put in vases, expensive stoles, trimming for dresses, feather ornaments, things like that. Quite a few birds aren't fit to sell, maybe because their beaks or spurs aren't right, maybe because they got crippled some way but aren't unhealthy at all, and we cook and can them for sale, down in the cannery. And there's a hatchery too, where we ship our eggs or chicks, whichever a buyer orders."

"None of that sounds illegal."

"Hell, no, it isn't."

"Then why does Link keep people out of here? Why does he hide out on this farm, like a ... a ... "

"He's not hiding, baby. He's staying away from people because he wants to protect his birds."

"Protect them?"

"Sure. Our breed of fighting cocks isn't like any other breed in the world. Link has spent his whole life developing it. It's called the Fury, and he's got pedigrees and patents on his high-priced roosters. He never sells his best breeders either. He works them as long as they can hop on the hens, and then he kills them. He's been offered terrific prices for his best ones, but he wouldn't take a million. And that's-why he runs visitors off."

"Because he's afraid they'll steal his prize roosters?"

"Sure, baby. Plenty of people would do it, he says. So he knows who every person is that sets foot on Tawnley land, and what business brought that person here ... But there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that, is there?"

Zoe felt the last vestige of her weariness, her fear, dropping away. "God, no ... Oh, Jock, Jock, I'm so ... so glad! It's wonderful to be free of the worry that you and Link were-"

"Well, we're not, baby. We're just guys who mind our own business and expect other guys to mind theirs."

She persisted. "What about the men who work here? Aren't they unhappy because they can't have their wives with them?"

"Hell, no. They haven't got wives, not any of them. They're soured, like Link, or divorced, or maybe widowed. They like it here. And if they don't, they can leave any time they want to. Link pays better wages than anybody else in this part of the country, and that holds the men. They respect Link too. They don't like Mendez, but they put up with his cussing, and his cussedness, because of the money they drag down. It works out fine."

She shivered a little, remembering the night she had heard Mendez and Tutie Bear in the bedroom across from Clitey's Corral. "I-I'm almost afraid to meet this Mendez. I've heard such terrible things about him. Why does Link keep him here?"

"Because he runs the place like a clock-the damnedest best clock in the Panhandle. Every order Link hands out, Mendez does it to the letter, even if it kills him and every guy on the farm. He's been

Link's right-hand man ever since I've known either of them."

He paused and grinned ruefully. "I'm not saying I like Mendez. I despise the louse. I feel like he'd stab anybody in the back if it would better him. He'd even stab me, or Link; I know he would. I've told Link so a hundred times. But Link says Mendez is the exact guy he needs for this job. So that's that."

Zoe shivered again. "Well, I'll keep out of his way even more than I do out of Link's, if that's possible. I'm scared to death of both of them."

Jock got up and came around the table toward her; lifting her to her feet, unzipping her dress and pulling out her great breasts, fondling them, crushing the nipples in his fingers. "I'm scared of those guys too, baby," he told her. "But they won't bother us. Nothing will. I'll work hard for Link, do whatever he tells me to. He'll pay me good for the hours I put in, and he'll leave us alone other times, I'm sure. We'll live our own life. And we'll make our own love ... How about a nice chunk of that little fur cap of yours right now, baby? These gorgeous boobies of yours are getting my hard up. And nothing can make it soft again but your pussy. Come on, baby, let me push this big prick into you a few good licks, just enough to explode it once. Then I'll go see what job Link's got lined out for me."

She didn't answer because she was sure he didn't expect her to. He probably wouldn't have heard her words if she'd said any. His mind was mounting her body already, living their intercourse ahead of its reality. God, how could he get so many hards, so fast? Was she going to have to take his pecker day and night, for years on end?

Well, if she did have to, perhaps it would work for her the way Clitey said it did for her. Clitey's first husband had screwed her half to death, even during her menstruations, and she had learned to love screwing-forced herself to love it so she wouldn't hate it. She had become a nympho-maniac after she divorced Duncan, and she'd been screwing men wholesale ever since. Zoe was completely sure that she could never relish any and every prick, the way Clitey did. All she wanted was to learn to want this one man's prick, her husband's-to warm up to his frantic motions in her crotch, to respond to them, to experience a climax of her own when he let his go off in her. She wanted desperately to fall in love with this man she was married to, so that her happiness would be real, not forced. She wanted her baby born into a house where the love would be genuine.

She was well rested now, this late in the day, so she gave herself without reservation to the frenzy of Jock's coition. She let him strip her and carry her to their bed, ease himself into her as he would. She moved when he moved, weaving her hips from side to side and from front to back, trying hard, terribly hard, to coax up a need within herself, a desire to do more than just accommodate his rod. If she could go off, the way a sex-adjusted wife was supposed to do in intercourse, then she would know that she loved Jock, that she would always love him ...

But it was not to be-at least not yet. When Jock could hold himself no longer, she told him to go off without her, that she just couldn't make it this time. She loved it anyway, she assured him, and she would have a climax ... well, sometime, she hoped.

He laughed gaily. "Sure you will, baby. Some night we'll screw till you do go off. I want you to, as much as you want to. It's the only way that a man and a woman know they're giving each other everything they've got, and getting completely satisfied in their screwing ... Okay, baby, here I go ... God, it's good. I could lay you forever, baby ... Oh! ... I'm coming.. ! Ooohhh ... ! "

He shot off, jerking his hips forward spasmodically, his whole body trembling.

He was limp in a moment, and he lay gasping from the joyous exhaustion of his climax Then, getting his breath, he got up and went to the shower. "I could screw you all day, baby," he called above the rush of water. "And sometime we'll do it, all we want to-like last night. But right now I'd better go see Link. He'll-likely tell me to do my screwing at night, and work for him in the daytime. He doesn't know how goddamn good it is when you're in love like we are."

When he had bathed and dressed, he came to her and kissed her as tenderly, as sweetly as ever a man kissed a woman. "I love you, baby," he said.

She touched his lips with a finger and pressed the dampness to her own mouth. "I love you too, darling."

And when he was gone, she knew that she meant it. She did love Jock Tawnley. Not yet like a wife, perhaps; not yet with the same need to rush to bed every whip stitch, to match cock to crotch as often as their bodily strength would let them. But that would develop as their friendship grew, as the baby within her grew toward its time to tear her open and come out of her. Long before her womb gave up Jock's matured seed, she would be loving her husband as he loved her. Surely she would. And that would be everything that life could ever hope to be.

She dressed, putting on her loosest bra, letting her big breasts move easily. Jock would reach for them when he came in the door tonight, more than-likely. The looser they were, the easier he could get them into his hands and his mouth. She might as well go topless at their meals-if she didn't expose her nipples, he would. And, as she thought about it, she was glad she could provide him the tingle, the thrill of great breasts, of "boobies" to kiss and to suck on. Just looking at her breasts or her pussy gave him a hard-on. Someday seeing his prick would do the same for her-she hoped.