Chapter 7
Jill awoke with a small hangover, just enough for a throbbing behind her eyes and a bitter taste in her throat. They'd both had too much to drink last night, but she remembered the latter part of the evening with pleasure, and stretched like a contented tigress.
She had been tigerish, riding Steve's penis violently, clawing at him later, when he mounted her from behind. She had even wanted to feel it in her anus, but hadn't dared suggest such a thing to Steve, no matter how high they were. It wasn't something he'd do, she knew.
Sitting up, she knuckled sleep from her eyes and put out a hand to the place her husband had slept beside her, but Steve was already up and gone. There was something else he hadn't done last night; he hadn't gone down on her, or even kissed lower than her breasts and rib cage. Jill had wanted more of that mad release, but it was another move she couldn't just make on her own.
Married to Steve Devlin for nine years, she couldn't come right out with it: Eat me, please. It would jolt the hell out of him, after all this time, and besides, he might want to know where and how she'd gotten such an idea. She certainly wasn't ready to tell him that.
Climbing from the bed, she went into the bathroom, and when she came out, she was showered and refreshed, cleaned and sparkling. She dressed in almost new jeans and boots, and a bright Western shirt; there was a dab of perfume behind each ear and between her breasts, and as an afterthought, upon her mound.
In the kitchen, she saw that Steve had fixed his own breakfast-cereal and toast, and Jill felt guilty for oversleeping. He probably was out on the ranch, eager to look everything over, and to meet with old Dink again. That was, if Dink was in any shape to talk.
Jill made a quick meal for herself, and drank an extra cup of coffee with two aspirins for what was left of her hangover. She felt good, really; she felt loved and wanted-especially wanted. Looking down into her cup, she thought how strange it all was, thought how she had been screwed by three different men, within little more than twenty-four hours. She'd only been laid by one, for the past nine years, then all of a sudden, she'd added two more to her list. And she'd enjoyed it all, especially the new thing with Aaron Mercer, and especially that monstrous cock he'd worked into her tight vagina.
Aaron, she thought. Somehow, she'd have to reach him again, and talk about the money, maybe get some sort of guarantee. She knew that seeing him would mean sex, for she wouldn't be able to stay away, if he wanted to lay her, to eat her. But even if Steve was home now, she still had to carry the main burden of the ranch, and if that meant screwing Aaron as many times as necessary, okay. Steve didn't have to know, and there was certainly enough of her to go around; she'd already proved that she could screw two men and screw them well, less than an hour apart.
When the phone rang. Jill jumped. It rang again before she could get to the living room to answer.
"Jill; Boyce Pittman here. I called to tell you-"
"That you were out here yesterday, bothering old Dink," she hissed.
He sounded genuinely puzzled. "Did he say that?"
Jill retreated hurriedly. "No, but he was drunk and I thought-but I guess it could have been my husband."
Boyce said, "How is your husband? Enjoying his wife as much as I did? Did you scratch and claw him when he got to pounding it to you?"
"You bastard; you must be in that phone booth, and if you think you're going to give me a bad time about laying you-"
"Oh, no; I enjoyed every second of it, Jill. I don't begrudge your husband getting a little pussy for himself. No-I called to tell you I can boost my cash offer on the ranch, just for old time's sake. How does seven thousand dollars sound to you? Above and beyond the debit, of course. All you have to do is to sign a quitclaim deed, and have Sergeant Devlin sign it, too."
Jill took a breath. "Try ten thousand on for size, Boyce. I've been talking to some people."
"Ten thousand? Now look here, Jill-I'm only doing this because I don't want to see you out in the cold without anything to show for the years of effort on that ranch, and-"
"Ten," she said, "ten."
"Goddamn it! Look, now-the bank can foreclose any time-"
"And wait two or three years, before it can sell the property to anyone else, meanwhile paying taxes on six hundred forty acres. The Rafter D is under the homestead law, Boyce, and I damned well know it. So do you."
He cleared his throat. "Oh, yes, yes. That's why I'm willing to give you something for your signatures; the bank may be able to unload the property and get its money back, if I don't have to wait too long."
"I'll think about it," Jill said. "I'll let you know in a day or so."
"No longer than that," Boyce said. "No more stalling, Jill. I mean, the sexual interlude has been pleasant, but no amount of screwing-even as good as you are-can build up to thirty thousand dollars."
She said, "You're pretty damned cocky."
"Why shouldn't I be? Your loving husband is back home, and you won't be so anxious to wave those pictures around. Oh, and by the way, Jill-ah, Mrs. Devlin, that is-the price includes your putting those pictures in my hand. You know which pictures, dear: the ones of you and I screwing on your husband's bed. Good-bye, now."
Jill put down the phone, her mind racing. Boyce was too arrogant, and she couldn't believe that he had changed overnight into someone so sure of himself, so unafraid of exposure and social stigma. He had also come up with a few thousand more dollars on the ranch, and the question was: why?
Aaron Mercer had said seventy thousand clear, after the mortgage is paid off.
And Boyce Pittman was now willing to go to ten thousand clear. A change of heart? Hardly; Boyce wasn't known for giving anything away. That meant the Homestead Act did have something to do with things, that Boyce was being hurried to sell at a fat profit.
Who was pushing him-Aaron Mercer?
She walked back into the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee, thinking hard. She didn't hear Steve come in, and when she turned around, she jumped in surprise. "Oh! Hi, husband-you startled me."
"Yeah," he said slowly, and she saw that his face was set, "sometimes wives forget their husbands are around. Or maybe it's convenient for them to forget they have husbands at all."
Jill frowned at him, her coffee cup balanced in one hand, sugar spoon in the other. "W-what do you mean, Steve?"
He said tightly, "I mean you forgot there's an extension in the barn. I guess you forgot because Dink never uses the phone or answers it. But I was standing right there by the tack room when it rang."
A cold knot gathered in her belly, and the cup shook in her hand. "Steve-I-I-"
"Put down the cup," he said, "and the spoon. I'm going to slap hell out of you."
Automatically, she obeyed him, then asked, "Did-did you hear it all? All that Boyce Pittman said?"
"Right down to the part about him screwing you on my bed."
She tried weakly, "Steve, I-"
He slapped her then, and she caromed off the kitchen table, tried to catch her balance, and staggered into the living room to fall to her knees. Red and white lights were going on and off behind her eyes, and a drum thumped hollowly in her head. Tears sprang from her eyes and slid wetly down her cheeks, though she tried to hold them back.
Gritting her teeth, she shook her head to clear it, and saw her hair ribbon fly off. Swiveling around, she stared up at his belt buckle, the buckle he'd won running the Texas barrels on Comet D, the last time he'd been home. Jill said, "Goddamn you, Steve, I guess I had that coming, but don't hit me again!"
She put her hands down to the carpet to help herself up. He reached around behind her and put his boot against her ass. He shoved hard, and Jill fell flat on her belly, her cheekbone bouncing off the rug.
Rolling over, she spat it at him: "Why, damn it? Because I laid another man? And what the hell did you do for the last two years in Vietnam-get by on wet dreams?"
"No," he said, "I made it with slope whores, and before that, I made it with Kraut whores, and gook whores. But I didn't marry a whore; I married a good woman."
Jill sat up again, and rubbed her cheek; both sides of her face felt numbed now. She said, "You married a woman, good or bad, for better or worse, and I didn't have a male whore to buy sex from. Look-your ego may be bruised right now, but do you remember telling me a long time ago that it would be okay if I took myself a transient lover while you were overseas? Do you remember that?"
He stood with his feet spread wide apart, his thumbs hooked into the black leather belt. "I remember, and you said, oh, no, that you could only do it if you loved the man. Do you love that stuffed shirt son of a bitch?"
"No," she said, sitting on the floor and not looking up into his cold face. "I was wrong, before. A woman can lay a man and not love him; I did."
"All these years," he said, "I treated you like a lady, like a wife, and all these years, you've been fucking around on the side."
"No, no! Just-just this week. I never did it before, and I wouldn't have done it this time, except for the ranch." Jill looked up now, her eyes blazing. "The Rafter D would have already been lost if I hadn't gone to Boyce Pittman and-and made myself available to him."
"Bullshit," he said. "You're looking for an excuse, an out."
She leaped up and faced him. "I'll be damned if I am! What the hell have you done to keep the place? You blew your last reenlistment bonus in a poker game-five thousand dollars. That would have beat off the bank for a long time, and-and the money you've spent on Vietnamese and German and Korean whores-that would have helped, too! I was here, me and that mortgage because you didn't give a damn about the Rafter D, so I had to do something to save it, to keep this land your parents worked for-and you, you-"
His eyes were flinty. "You didn't have to fuck for it."
She said, "He wouldn't take a handshake."
"What else did you do for that pompous bastard? Something you never did for me? Did you go down on him, Jill? Did you eat his tender, civilian prick?"
"No!" she screamed. "No, you son of a bitch-no!"
"You must have done something pretty good," he went on inexorably. "He just offered you ten thousand dollars above the mortgage. You must have given him some pretty good blow jobs, or took it up the ass-something special. And all this time, you've conned me into thinking you were just a sweet, innocent kid."
Jill moved back until she could reach behind her back and heft the ash tray on the end table there. She said, "Stay the hell away from me, Steve."
He didn't look like her husband any more; he was a battered, brutish man with something evil flickering in his eyes, with something terribly cynical stamped in the creases around his mouth. He came toward her, rocking on the balls of his feet. "Cocksucker," he said.
She pegged the ash tray at him, threw it with a full-armed swing that would have fractured his skull had the heavy thing landed solidly. But Steve bobbed under it, and it slammed into the wall.
Then he was on her, iron fingers locked around her wrist, jerking her into his body with a thump that knocked the breath from her lungs. Jill sagged, and would have slumped to the floor, if his other hand hadn't caught into her pullover blouse. With a single jerk, he tore it apart, and when she tried to pull away, he ripped at her jeans like some huge animal gone mad.
When he let her fall, she was naked except for her boots, but she was getting her wind back. She punched at his belly, and he turned to let her fist slide off his hip. Jill tried to kick up at him, to turn him into a gelding, because she was so damned mad at the mean son of a bitch. He slapped her foot aside and left her whole leg stinging.
Crying, gasping helplessly in her hurt and her anger, she stared through tear-blurred eyes and saw him dropping his own jeans, his shorts. In dismay, she saw his penis rise swollen and ugly, turning harder and longer as she looked at it.
"What-w-what are you-"
He lock-stepped to her, slowed by his dropped pants. In horror, she stared up at him towering above her as he said, "I'm going to make you eat it, my darling little wife. I'm going to take this cock and ram it right down your throat, and you're going to blow it. You hear me, you cheating bitch? You'll suck my cock and like it-just as you did to Pittman."
"I-I didn't," she sobbed, "I won't-I won't!" And she scrambled backward, scuttled like a crab trapped on the beach and trying for safety. But there was no safe place. Her back came up against the couch, and she felt a blaze of pain in her scalp as his hand twisted in her hair.
Jill saw his hairy lower belly, his thick thighs slabbed with muscle; she saw his balls swinging furred, and the veined shaft that rose to a ballooned and purpled head. The vertical slit was wet, she saw, and revulsion filled her.
"Steve-no-please-don't make me d-do this! I never did it to him, to anybody-I swear-I swear!"
"Here," he said, "open your mouth."
The thing lunged at her and she managed to twist her head so that it slipped off her chin. "I'll bite it off! I will, damn you-I'll bite it in half!"
Her face was pulled into his belly, and his penis slid along her cheek; Steve ground her face into his belly, into his balls, and she gasped desperately for air. Then he shoved the head of it between her open lips, and she groaned.
The hot, swollen head pushed into her mouth, and she felt it slide over her tongue. His hands were on her head now, and he just kept thrusting his cock deeper, skidding it along the roof of her mouth, and Jill bit down as hard as she could.
Steve had been ready for the move, and felt the warning in his thumbs laid alongside her jawbones. Jill thought for an instant that her head would shatter, that her skull would be crushed, and she sobbed as she pulled at his wrists. He was so damned powerful, so damned strong.
"Ooh-ahh-n-no-" her voice was muffled, her pleas were muted and indistinguishable, for his meaty pole was filling her mouth now, and tapping at the entrance to her throat.
"Use your tongue," Steve said. "Lick it in there, wrap your hot tongue around it, stick the tip of it in the head of my prick. Do it, Jill, or I'll crack your head like an eggshell."
Jill used her tongue, licked it up and around the head of his cock, wrapped it around the flanged glans and felt the satiny skin of the shaft against her teeth as she worked the end of her tongue into the wet and sticky slit.
"Suck it," he ordered. "Pull on it, baby."
She did it, afraid not to, shuddering as he began to stroke his cock into her mouth, taking longer and longer thrusts until she could feel the spongy head reaching far back into the velvet pocket of her throat. Jill sucked the moving cock, eased up as Steve pulled it back, sucked harder as he shoved it in, and she knew the feel of his hairy balls against her chin.
Gasping, flinching each time he pushed too far and she thought she might have to throw up, Jill tried to get it over with, to hurry him so it would be done, finished for now and for all time to come. Her hands lifted and she took hold of the cheeks of his ass, working her fingertips around so that every time he drew back for another long stroke into her throat, his anus came into contact.
She sucked him hard, curling her tongue and biting down gently, and she knew that he was going wild with the sensations. "Uh!" he grunted, and "Uh-uh!" again, and his ass churned with the urgency that was building so powerfully up in his swinging balls.
He was going to come, she knew. He was going to come-and in her mouth, perhaps down her throat. Oh, no, she screamed inside her head-oh, no! No, damn it! She couldn't let him degrade her so, she would not accept it-she'd spit it out-she'd-"
"Ahh!" he said above her where she could not see, "ahh, you bitch, that's it! I'm coming!" His strong hands gripped her head into immovable position while his busy prick pumped in and out and suddenly she was flinching and strangling on the ejaculation.
Too late, too late.
Steve came in a frenzy, hunching his hairy pelvis tightly to her open and gasping mouth, his prick buried to the hilt into her mouth, her throat. His semen fountained out from the convulsive head of his cock, and the hot, thick shower bathed her throat. She had to swallow or choke on the heavy fluid, so she swallowed and swallowed, and the stuff went slipping down her throat and into her stomach.
H His hands loosened and fell away from her head. Jill edged back and tore her mouth from his still pulsating cock; she wiped her hands across her lips and spat, spat again while he backed from her to fumble up his shorts and lift his jeans into place.
"There," he said, his voice ragged. "That wasn't bad, was it? No worse than blowing the banker."
"You son of a bitch," she said evenly, "I told you I'd never done that to anybody-not Pittman, not you, not-" and she caught herself barely in time, so she didn't mention Aaron's name, but instead said, "Not the other two boys I screwed before I met you. And I won't do it again with you, mister. If you try it again, I'll shotgun you!"
Steve's smile was thin, but she thought his aplomb had been shaken. "Okay, Jill-but I'm not through with you, or with that sneaky bastard, either. Pittman's got a daughter, hasn't he? Sure-a cute little kid who ought to be fifteen or sixteen years old by now."
Staring, Jill said, "She's only fourteen; Sherry Pittman is only fourteen, but what does she have to do with-"
"A horse trade; my wife for his daughter. He put the prick to you, and I'll put it to Sherry. See how he likes that, the bastard. See how you like it."
She climbed slowly up and sat on the couch, her legs trembling, unable to stop herself from wiping at her mouth again. "Steve, right now I'd like it fine if you fried in hell, but maybe I'll think it over and change my mind; I'm not sure about that part. I realize that you're hurt and feel betrayed, and maybe you hate me right now, too. But we've been together awhile, and everything is all screwed up, and it could straighten itself out, if we give ourselves a chance."
He turned his back and fumbled with his belt buckle. "I don't know. I just don't know, goddamn it! You and me-you're not the girl I married-and I'm not-but look!" and he whirled savagely upon her. "Look now-I'm not going to back off from Boyce Pittman. I heard him running his fat mouth today on the phone, heard him bragging and gloating how he'd screwed you on my bed. I listened to that arrogant shit talk about how no amount of fucking was worth the money, and I don't think he ever intended to hold off on the mortgage. I think he was fucking you more ways than one. So when I find enough money to push him back from the ranch, and after I get to his prize daughter, Pittman is going to know it. I'll nail his hide to the wall, any way I have to do it-and that's even if I have to put a bullet through his fucking head!"
Jill leaped up from the couch as Steve strode for the front door, his boot heels banging down hard, but she stumbled over her torn jeans, and he was gone before she could reach him. Not caring that she was nude except for the incongruity of her cowboy boots, Jill ran onto the porch after him. But Steve was already trotting across the yard and in a moment would be piling into the truck.
She screamed after him. "Don't do it! Listen to me-there's no way you can borrow enough money-there's no way you can stop Pittman from foreclosing, even if he has to wait years before he can sell the ranch again! Steve-Steve! I know what I'm talking about, and if you get to his kid, he'll forget the ranch and come down on us like a bomb. Damn it, damn it-Steve! You'll lose the Rafter D!"