Chapter 10

No sooner had I cut the ropes tied around the wrists of the captive whom Tulio Verduga had been whipping at the shade tree than the unfortunate young girl staggered away and turned so that I wouldn't see her bare back. The shirt hadn't been ripped down the front, so her titties weren't showing at all. She reached behind her neck to try to unknot the handkerchief which had been tied over her mouth, and she was trying to say something, but there was a gag still between her lips. "Let me do that," I volunteered. I approached slowly, the way I would a strange animal, so as not to cause any fear. Nevertheless, she kept backing away until she bumped her naked back against the wall. Then she cried out and slipped down on her knees and bowed her head and begun to rub her bleeding back. I turned to send a last savage look at Dad's foreman, but he had long since disappeared. Whatever this girl had done, it couldn't have been bad enough to merit a thrashing like this. Those welts were deep and dark, where they hadn't broken the skin, and when you whip like that you do it for viciousness, not for sensual pleasure-unless of course our friend Tulio got his kicks that way.

"I'm sorry. I own this vineyard, and I didn't know this was going on. Let me get that handkerchief off and take that gag out. Then you can tell me all about it," I said soothingly. I knelt down, my jack knife in hand, and unknotted the girl's head. She whimpered and didn't move, I saw her shoulders shuddering and after a moment I figured it would be all right, so I deftly cut the handkerchief on the back of her neck and let it slide off. She opened her mouth, and I could see that another handkerchief had been crammed between her lips, and I pulled it out.

"That's better," I went on softly. "Now suppose you tell me who you are and what you were doing here to make that heavy-handed foreman lace into you like that."

"I-M-my name is J-Jane Wilson. He-he wanted to-to rape me, I think, and I wouldn't let him so he tied me up to the tree and he was b-beating me. I think he would have killed me, he was so mad because I wouldn't let him-let him-"

"All right, we'll forget that." I scowled again in the general direction which Tulio had taken. "I'll have a talk with him on Monday, and we'll see if something can't be done to curb his little extra-curricular activities. What are you doing here so late? Do you realize it's almost dawn?"

"Yes. I couldn't help it though."

"You're not making sense, Miss Wilson. Damn it, we'd better do something about that back of yours. It's pretty late to be getting a doctor, but I've got an idea." I had, too. I was going to take Jane Wilson back to Madge Fryburg's and put Madge's practical nurse's training to work. I'll admit it was rather ungentlemanly, seeing as how we had both honked each other out and poor Madge was probably sleeping by now, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time. I didn't like the look of those welts at all. "Don't tell me you work in the vineyards, a young girl like you? You'll admit that wearing jeans and a shirt like that, and coming here in the dead of night, a foreman might get the idea that you were up to no good. And what was that Tulio said about trying to make away with one of the cuttings?"

"That's a lie!" She slowly got up from her knees, wincing with pain, and I saw that she had sky-blue eyes, and they were filled with tears. Her face was haggard, and it was very piquant. I could see how easy it was to take her for a boy, quite apart from her slim figure and that man's costume she had on. She had small orange-like titties, widely spaced, and they hardly filled her shirt out enough to catch the lecherous male eye. She was about five feet five, and the jeans moulded out long slim legs, very gracefully slender thighs and calves, and a compact, jouncy round-cheeked bottom that was also very boyish. With her closely cropped hair, her dainty little pugnose, and her small rather thin mouth, she had a certain provocative and yet troubling charm. I didn't think she was much more than seventeen or eighteen. But I could see how a lecher like Tulio would be greedy for her pussy, especially if she was cherry. Lots of guys like them young when they're still unfledged, just to prove what brave cocksmiths they are. Me, I don't like overly green fruit.

"It's not true, what he said," Jane Wilson passionately broke out. "I wasn't trying to steal any cuttings. I-I wanted to show him one from another vineyard, if you want to know the truth. I-I have a cousin who has a few acres on the other side of town and wants to learn how to grow really fine grapes, and Mr. Verduga said he'd give me some good pointers for her. I was to have dinner with him, and I did, pretty late, maybe about ten-thirty or eleven. And we got to talking, and then he suggested we come out here and he'd show me what he meant. And then he tried to-to-rape me."

She was shuddering now from the aftermath, and she suddenly put her arms around my waist and leaned her chin on my chest, and could glance and see the ugly-looking streaks on that slim pale white back of hers. Maybe her story was too pat, and maybe I didn't entirely buy it all, but there was no mistaking the fact that she had really got herself a good sound thrashing without any fun in the process. That is, if I were a girl, and even if there was only one man on earth and his name was Tulio Verduga, I think I'd rather die a virgin. I noticed that he had a bad garlic breath, decaying teeth, and I don't think he'd taken a bath in at least a week. Not that you expect the foreman of a vineyard to be a beau brummel, not if he's producing good bottlings for you, but on the other hand you don't expect to find him tying up a young girl and whipping hell out of her at about four in the morning in the vineyard itself.

"Well, I'm certainly going to give him hell when I get to him on Monday, Miss Wilson. Meanwhile let's get out of here and into my car, and I'll take you somewhere where your back can be treated."

"Oh, please, I'd rather not. I can go home, I'll be all right. I don't live far from here."

"Look, Miss Wilson, I told you my name is Carl Venturi and I own this vineyard. And anything that happens on it concerns me. For all I know, if I let you go now and there's an infection, you'd have every right to bring a civil suit against me. The least I can do is to have your back treated so that you can rest comfortably and get what sleep you can. Now you get into that car before I get really firm about it."

"Well, I suppose I better. My back does hurt."

"Of course it does. Here, I'll carry you."

I was really getting gallant within this short span of twenty-four hours. I had started by fantailing Madge Fryburg for the wrong reason, I had just come from a couple of memorable hours of the most passionate fucking I had ever indulged in, and now I had blundered upon a strange nocturnal scene of sadism, and I was carrying off the victim to what she could probably say would be my lair for more fucking. Moreover, she didn't exactly appeal to me, even if I'd had that in mind. I remembered that Tulio had said something about finding Jane Wilson there with a knife and a plastic envelope. The moon was starting to set, but there was still enough light to look in the immediate vicinity of the shade tree to which my charming armful had been tied for her switching. I couldn't find a thing.

The thought came to me that she might have concealed the damning evidence in the pockets of her jeans, but right now wasn't exactly the time to search her. She might really have thought I was going to rape her and take seniority over the foreman by dint of owning the vineyard, and if she had thought that and decided to screech her head off for help, I would really have made a dramatic debut back in my home town. Now that I'm on the subject, I might as well add that my dad had never really been accepted by the gentry, because even in a town that got its origin from farming, the people on the right side of the tracks who came later on always looked down their cultured noses at the sons of toil who do what they considered menial jobs and don't belong to the country club at the local orchestra hall. You can say what you like about the East and some of the snooty cliques who blackball you if you move into their territory and try to join a golf-course or a tennis court or what have you, that I personally have found more snobbery in California than anywhere else in these United States.

Jane Wilson didn't weigh too much, and she felt nice. I let her fling her slim arms around my neck, my left arm was just around the tops of her slim hips, and my right arm was against the hollows of her knees. I eased her into the Thunderbird after walking about a hundred yards till I came to a gate which could be opened only from the inside, and then I drove back to Madge Fryburg's bungalow and rang the bell and waited, while Jane Wilson twisted to one side, so that she wouldn't have to lean her sore back against the seat, huddled herself and kept out of sight all she could.

I leaned on the bell, and I was ashamed of myself but I couldn't think of anything else at the minute. Finally a light flashed on in the living room of the little bungalow, and then the door swung back on the bar and a husky sleep-thickened voice wanted to know who it was. "I'm back for a repeat performance, Madge," I told her.

I heard her gasp, and then the door closed and was pulled open and she stood there in a sheer white nylon nightie, the dark patch of pussyhair plainly outlined between those luscious thighs of hers. She was wide awake now, and her eyes were flashing: "What sort of man are you, anyhow, Carl Venturi? Don't you think you're a little bit inconsiderate? I had just fallen off into the nicest sleep. I was even dreaming about you."

"I'm very flattered. But seriously, Madge, I drove over to the vineyard and I found my foreman beating up some poor young gal. I chased him off and then I drove her here because I didn't know anybody else who could take care of her this time of night. He took a switch to her back and he cut the skin pretty badly. All I could think of was that you're a nurse."

"All right, I'm sorry to go off halfcocked again," she said wearily. "Bring her in and I'll do what I can."

I started chuckling. She looked at me and frowned as if I were nuts. Maybe I was, but she had just made a Freudian slip. I muttered to her, "I would have sworn you were born with a sweet little furry spot between those lovely long legs of yours, and here you're talking about going off halfcocked."

"Another crack like that, Carl Venturi, and you can just look elsewhere for your nursing services," she angrily retorted. And I kept on laughing, because this time she had talked about cracks, and there was no doubt that she had one of the hottest and tightest ones I've ever dipped my candlewick into to get on fire.

I hurried back to the Thunderbird, lifted Jane Wilson out of it and carried her into the little bungalow.

As soon as Madge Fryburg saw Jane's back, she let out a gasp and then she looked at me and said very softly, "I'm sorry. This time I'm doing the apologizing. Take her into my bedroom and get that shirt off her and I'll go get some hot water and medications and maybe a bandage or two, then she can sleep there."

I carried Jane Wilson back into the bedroom. The sheets of that bed where Madge and I had celebrated my homecoming to Fresno were rumpled and didn't speak well for her being a tidy housekeeper. But I thought she could be forgiven under the circumstances. I laid Jane carefully down on her tummy, and then suggested that she let me take off the shirt. She didn't raise any objections, but I noticed that she clamped her hands under her titties as soon as the shirt was off, and closed her eyes and shivered. There was something disturbingly sensual about her body, now that all she wore were the jeans and the sox. Of course I'd taken off her shoes. She had such a saucy bottom I wondered that it hadn't tempted Tulio into pulling down those jeans and switching her bare ass. Probably, if I hadn't come along when I had, he might have got down to that eventually. Something was going on in the winegrowing business, and I began to feel glad that I had come home, and sorry that I hadn't come home sooner. Maybe Dad and I could have had some hunting or fishing up in the Sierra Madre range and got to know each other better. But it was too late for that now.

Madge came back all prim and pretty in the white nurse's uniform-though she didn't have anything else under it except a slip-and started patching up the cuts and bruises and the ugly welts with which my foreman had decorated Jane Wilson's pale white back and shoulders. She moaned and squirmed a little, but it began to ease the pain, and then Madge put on a little mentholated salve, told her to get some sleep and then turned out the light and walked out with me back into the kitchen. "Well, Mr. Venturi," she said rather prissily, "I'll say one thing, this is more exciting than a vacation. The day started with my trying to take care of your poor father, then I got myself bruised and blackened in the process because of a misunderstanding, next you took advantage of my loving nature and finally after I had thought I would finally get some sleep, you brought me another woman. I wouldn't have been surprised at all if you'd 'fessed up and told me that you were the one who had laid on that switch. After what you did to my bottom, I wouldn't have been surprised at all, I'll tell you honestly. And now of course I won't be able to get back to sleep at all and it's going to be one of those dreary Sundays in Fresno. Hot and miserable, instead of being in Yellowstone Park, I'm sitting here in my own kitchen with you wondering what I ever did to deserve all this."

I bent over and kissed her on the forehead, and then my hands moved down from her shoulders to those gorgeous gourd-like titties of hers and squeezed gently. She started to protest, but I silenced her with a kiss which is still the most effective way a man can shut a woman up. "I know an excellent soporific," I murmured after I'd finished the kiss.

Her eyes questioned me. I smiled. Then, my hands tightening on her swelling titties, I muttered, "If you've got another bed in this house, we could always resume what we had been doing just before I left. I guarantee to put you to sleep this time, Madge baby."

She stared at me, her brows arched, her eyes suspicious for a minute. Then she started giggling, and rose from the kitchen chair into which she'd wearily sunk down. "Oh, very well, Mr. Venturi. We might as well. Maybe it will be relaxing this time. Because it wasn't before, you know. You made me so hot I actually couldn't fall asleep at all after you left. And maybe too, now that you're a little tired, there won't be any danger of your reverting to your apparent mania for spanking or whipping. Come along, I'll put you up in the guest room for what's left of the night."

And she did just that. And the surprising thing about it was that tired as I was, I felt just as horny as when she'd done that striptease for me some hours before. Madge Fryburg didn't get too much sleep at all, I'm afraid, but after two more exciting love bouts, I fell into a deep dreamless slumber with my head cradled on those juicy loveglobes of hers. And if he was already in Heaven looking down on his only son and heir, somehow I don't think Marcantonio Venturi disapproved at all of the way I had spent my first night in Fresno.