Chapter 2
At the bank, Boyce Pittman was a different man, but when Jill looked across the big, polished desk at him, she could also see the nakedness and the red-brown hair that grew so thickly in his crotch. Seeing that in her mind, she could remember how he had turned her on yesterday, because now he had that flinty, ungiving look.
"Just dropped by," she said, sinking into a rich leather chair and crossing her legs. She was wearing faded jeans and boots now, but she knew how the pants clung, and saw his eyes flick to her man's shirt, where her breasts pushed against the thin material. Arching her back to make them more prominent, she said, "I had to pick up some feed and stuff for the ranch, so I thought I'd make sure how much more time you're giving me-on the note."
Pittman cleared his throat and leaned back in his leather swivel chair; it was built tall and wide, with a regal scroll up top. He said, "Well, Mrs. Devlin-there are my responsibilities to the stockholders of this bank. The note is far overdue and . . . "
She put her purse on the thick carpet beside her chair and ran both hands across her belly, sliding the fingers insinuatingly from her navel to her hipbones and back again. Legs stretched and parted, she stared at him; Jill licked at the ripeness of her lips, and said, "Oh, you can find a way. A brilliant man like you can always find ways to circumvent rules meant for more ordinary men. All we need is just a little more time. I thought you and I had discussed all this yesterday."
"Ah, yes," he said, and she noticed how his eyes moved toward the closed office door. "Yesterday was-very interesting, but I seldom mix business with pleasure. If you have more time, how is your husband going to pay off twenty thousand dollars? Not on a sergeant's income."
Jill continued to rub her groin, now dropping her hands to stroke the tips of her fingers along her full thighs. "Oh, but you forget the reenlistment bonuses the army's giving these days. If Steve reenlists instead of retiring at twenty years, he can draw as much as we owe the bank, or more."
Pittman made a steeple of his fingers and tried not to look at her thighs. "And if he doesn't reenlist?"
She shrugged, making certain that her breasts jiggled with the motion of her shoulders. "He'll bring home some money-travel pay, unused leave time, ration money, savings-all that. I don't know just how much, but at least it will be enough to pay the interest. And there's the calf crop, the new foals."
Pittman leaned forward and shuffled papers on his desk. Jill could see the indecision working in him, and read the play of emotions that he struggled with, but she didn't think too many people would interpret them as well. Because she was a woman who had known him intimately, she could reach intuitively below the surface and sense his actions. Others would see only the near-expressionless face; others wouldn't have the sexual contact she had, and perhaps not be able to dangle its lure before Boyce Pittman.
"The calf crop, the foals," he said. "Beef prices are fairly high, but those quarterhorses-"
"We'll get rid of most of them," she cut in, "soon as Steve comes home, just keep the old stud and a mare or two. We've learned that you have to build a reputation for running horses, in order to sell them, but we just haven't had the time or money."
"Ah, yes, the money." Pittman lifted a ballpoint and clicked it, made quick, precise notes on a pad. "I can stretch a point or two, with you. For a while, that is, Mrs. Devlin. As you said, there are methods; but I can't simply ignore my duties to the bank, even though there are-compensations."
Slowly, gracefully, Jill stood up. Lifting her arms high, she adjusted the straw cowboy hat on her honey-blonde hair, and knew that her breasts were standing out in bold relief. With a little roll of her hips, she leaned for her purse, turning at an angle so that Pittman could see the way her jeans hugged her buttocks. She felt wanton, bitchy, but there was just a little undercurrent of desperation in her, also; she had to keep Boyce Pittman on the hook, until after her husband got home. Besides, there was a new awareness in her body, a fever that had been brought out by the stimulation of a new and different man.
"I'll be available for a conference," she said, "any time you feel you might have a question or two. The only hand I have at the ranch is old Dink Watson, and he stays in the barn."
Pittman's eyes raked over her again with an almost physical impact, touching her breasts and moving down her flanks to settle into the base of her groin, trying to probe through the cloth that covered her pubic mound.
"Yes," he said, "yes, I'll call you very soon."
"Please do," she said. "There are still so many things to-discuss."
His eyes flickered, and she thought he might come around the desk and kiss her, perhaps run his hands over her body and follow the route his eyes had already traveled. But here he was a different man, proper and calculating, so he only flushed slightly and nodded, and of course, stood up as she left his office.
Jill was conscious of the way her thighs brushed in passing, of her nipples pushing into her shirt. It would have been fun, doing it right there in the staid surroundings of the Mid-Oregon Trust Bank, squirming naked and hot on that deep pile carpet while the bank president fed the meat to her. Boyce would never let himself go to that extent, though; he was first the banker, then the lover. Or the luster, she thought; nobody had said anything about love.
She was still in love with her husband, with Steve Devlin, Master Sergeant, United States Army. He was eleven years older than Jill, and more than two decades of soldiering had scarred and weathered him, but he knew how to treat a woman; there was tenderness in him, and an abiding devotion. There were two or three things that flawed him, and one was his profession, the army. The army was his true wife, and any other woman could only be a temporary mistress, until that first love affair had run its course.
Sergeant Devlin's first wife hadn't been able to hold on; she'd taken their kids and called off the marriage, and so far as Jill knew, he hadn't seen or heard from them since. Jill had been his wife for nine years, and traveled with him until they inherited the ranch. She couldn't have gone to Vietnam with him, anyhow, so she tried running the ranch until he made up his mind about getting out. She hadn't done so well with it.
And now she had cheated on Steve, for the first time in their married life, for the first time in nine pretty good years, except for the separations. But it was a good part his fault, at that. He'd lost his last reenlistment bonus in a crap game. All that money just tossed away, while he knew damned well his parents' ranch had a mortgage on it.
Her pickup was parked down the street from the bank, feed sacks piled into the bed, salt blocks and a roll of barbed wire that Dink Watson said he needed. It seemed that everything went for the animals, she thought; there was only a small box of groceries for Dink and herself. Jill climbed into the truck and started it; as she pulled away, the mirrors showed her a gray Buick easing from the curb, also.
She wheeled the truck on down the main street of Midway, turning off the main highway and onto the state road three miles out. There was more dust here, and she stayed ahead of it, avoiding the bumps and dips from habit, slowing for the curves she knew so well. Another turn to the right, and she drove along a little used county road.
Her sensuousness bothered her, nagged at her body, and she thought this was something like being awakened that first time by Steve. This constant awareness of her skin and flesh was that way, akin to the flowering that had happened to her after her first sexual experience with the man who was soon to be her husband.
She hadn't been a virgin, but she wished she had been, so he could have been the one to take her cherry. It would have made a big difference, for the first two fumbling boys she had known had just about turned her off on sex, and she was practically a twenty-year-old frigid woman, until Steve Devlin came along.
The truck hit a low spot in the road, and jolted her back to the present, but Jill pressed her thighs warmly together and smiled at the residue of memory. Steve Devlin was a tender and accomplished lover, a learned practitioner in the sensual arts, but he was also thoughtful and considerate; he never forced anything on a woman that she didn't seem to want.
So there had never been any oral contact, nor any perversion about the anus; but everything else, she thought-every other wildly delightful position that two passionate people could get into. It had been more than enough to keep Jill content, so long as Steve was in the country. She supposed it had been good for him, too; he always stayed close to home and paid constant attention to her, when he was stateside.
But he wasn't stateside now, and hadn't been for too long a time. And the damned ranch had to be held onto, for they had no place else to go, except back into the great olive drab womb for the rest of their lives. Jill had just about had it with the army, and two wars should have put it down for Steve, too, only she wasn't all that certain about him. His letters never came right out and said he was retiring.
She turned the truck onto Rafter D land, and held to the wheel as it bounced over the rutted road that led half a mile back to the ranch house. It was good land, encircled by forest and with enough water to irrigate more than two hundred of its acres; there was pasture land besides, and even if all the fences were going bad, they could be fixed up. Happening to glance into a side mirror, Jill caught the reflection of sunlight off another car, a wink of metallic silver that puzzled her.
She let the truck idle in neutral, watching the mirrors, and after a while, the car came back down the county road, moving slowly; she could make out two men in the gray Buick-one big man and a slim one. The car hesitated at the ranch sign, then pulled off in a billowing of stirred dust. Jill frowned as she drove on; there was only a dead end farther up the road; any other ranches were down the other way. The Rafter D bordered national forest land on three sides, and any car coming this far up the road couldn't be going anywhere else.
Tourists, she thought, and passed beneath the big log gateway with the hanging sign, bumping over the cattle guard below it. Then she remembered seeing the gray car as it came from the curb near the bank in town. Her frown deepened; was she being followed for some strange reason known only to Boyce Pittman? Was he actually jealous?
The stock in the near pasture looked fine, she thought; if they could only hold the herd together for a few more years, just selling off the runt calves and breeding selectively, the Rafter D would be in good shape. Cut down on the horses, and pour that much more feed into the Herefords, and it wouldn't take long.
As she pulled the truck up to the barn, the stallion hung his head over the corral fence and whinnied at her. Not Comet D, she thought; not the stallion; they'd keep him, if everything else had to go.
Taking the box of groceries from the pickup bed, she carried them toward the house, leaving the truck for Dink to unload when he came in from riding fence. Jill looked down near the house and saw tire tracks that she hadn't left there, off to one side in the dry dirt. Not a car, though; another truck. She shook her head, and went on into the house, into the kitchen where she put the grocery box on a table.
Somebody else had come to visit, then; Boyce Pittman drove a money-saving Toyota. Maybe a Buick would have heavy tires like those that had left the tracks, but she doubted it. She didn't like it, either. Too many things were disturbing the usual calm schedule of the ranch, and they bothered Jill.
She bothered herself, too. Damn, she thought, reaching into the box and setting cans up on a shelf near the stove; after the lay she'd gotten yesterday, she should be docile and more or less content, but instead, her body seemed to be crying out for more and more.
It had after Steve first laid her. She thought of him again, of the masculine gentleness he exuded, the charm he could display to a woman. Steve Devlin had been all over the world, and his travels taught him many things, especially about women, although Jill had often wondered why his screwing wasn't affected by all the different kinds of women he'd known. But she didn't really want it different, she decided long ago; she was perfectly content with Steve's screwing just as it was-slow and tender and deeply gratifying.
He would put his face between her breasts, and the warmth of his breath made her skin tingle, made her nipples rise straight up. His hands would cup her breasts, push down on them, and his mouth would taste first one blunt point, then the other, giving both of them equal treatment and equal time.
Then his hands would stray below, caressing her rib cage, drifting to her hips, and there they would separate, one hand dipping around to fondle one haunch, as if he was weighing and complimenting the cheek of her ass. The other hand would trail over her belly, dawdle awhile at the belly button, then wander down, down to her pubic mound. And all the while, he would be licking, sucking, pulling lightly and lovingly upon her nipples.
Jill's mound would surge upward, push its hairy softness into the palm of his hand and her labia would puff themselves, expand in eagerly damp anticipation for the coming caress of his finger.
Steve wouldn't keep her waiting long; he'd tease awhile, sliding a fingertip up and down the lips of her vulva, making her slippery, making her quiver and squirm for more. About then, she would grab for his penis, and squeeze its hard warmth in her hand until he stopped tickling and eased his finger into her ready vagina. Steve was very good with his fingers; one of them would explore the hood and finally the clitoris, stroking it to a state of savage excitement, and two other fingers would fill the entrance to her vagina, while a thumb teased her anus. He never went any farther than just teasing her anal ring, but the very touch of anything there turned her on so much that she would be burning to screw.
Then Steve would mount her, or have her crawl over and ride his penis, or turn so that they were side by side, with one of her legs lifted over him. It changed around often, sometimes even during their lovemaking; she had sat upon his cock facing away from him, and he had done it dog fashion to her, using her dangling tits for handholds as he thrust his stiff penis steadily up inside her clenching vagina.
He never came before she did, always holding back until she had reached at least one orgasm, and more often two, before letting go and pumping himself strongly, hungrily into her until he also came. Then she would shake and grind and luxuriate in the most intimate sensation in the world-that of a man's hot semen shooting into her pussy, filling the pulsating sheath of it with juicy oils. Jill dug that the most, and tried to match his moment of ecstasy, or failing that, to come quickly upon the spurting of his liquids.
Sweet and understanding, Steve was; never hurried and never abrupt. She was so very lucky to have gotten a man like him. Oh, there were moments of anger, of flare-up and edge of violence that he sometimes showed her, and she had noticed how other men walked softly around her husband.
But Steve had never slapped her, even when she yelled at him about getting drunk, or gambling money they needed. Usually he just rode out her temper storms in silence, or walked out. Still, she wouldn't trade him for any man she'd ever met.
Jill found herself staring down at the stove, and opened a can of soup, broke out some hot dogs from the freezer. Dink Watson preferred to do his own cooking, and usually ate mulligan or beans-when he ate. The first few days of every month, the old hired hand didn't eat, he drank. He was useless then, passed out in his bunk or mumbling at ancient shadows in the barn. At least he didn't smoke, and she'd learned to accept the odor of snuff about him, to step wide of where he was aiming.
She looked at the hot dogs boiling, and saw the phallic symbolism in them, the upcurving shapes that suggested the male organ in erection. She liked them thicker than that, she thought-and longer; besides, the wieners had no flared heads. Jill felt her face go warm and poured mushroom soup into a heavy mug; if the soup was lighter, creamier, she'd find identity in that, too.
What if Steve found out she'd been laying another man? Jill sat down at the kitchen table and looked into the steaming cup. She wasn't certain just what his reaction would be, but she had a hunch it could be dangerous. They had talked of separations, of needs they both would have, and Steve was frank about making it with prostitutes, especially in a combat area. Halfheartedly, he'd offered her the same relief, so long as she was careful and discreet, but Jill said, "Oh, no; never! I'm not like that, because with me it has to be love, not just sex, so that means you, and nobody else." But now she knew better.