Chapter 18

By the first of September, with the harvest roughly about two weeks away, I was really frantic. The morning mail had brought me a stiff, stilted letter from Philip Young of Overland Trust and Savings, indicating that he and his directors felt that it would be necessary to call in the balance of the mortgage by the first of October, following which the Venturi Vineyards would be taken over by the holder of the mortgage. I had spent the last week or so, without any need for going into lengthy details, hopping planes from Fresno to L.A., Frisco, Oklahoma City, Houston, and even Chicago, talking to the biggest wholesale wine and liquor dealers, and naturally talking to Venturi Vino. I had managed to take along a few bottles of good white Pinot Chardonnay, and a couple of bottles of Dad's finest Burgundy. I got a few orders, maybe about six or seven thousand dollars in all, but it wouldn't meet the mortgage in full. I was working there without any salary, and for these trips I was actually using part of the money I'd saved up while I was selling real estate in Frisco.

To show you how earnestly I worked, I didn't once think about pussy during all that barnstorming I was doing.

But when I came back on the first of September and got that nasty letter from Philip Young, I called Tulio Verduga into my office and laid down the law to him. He thought he could have the harvest by the fifteenth, which fell on a Saturday. I immediately sent wires out to the big wholesalers I had visited along my itinerary, inviting them to an old fashioned festival complete with wine, women and song. Then I phoned the big L.A. and Frisco papers and let them know that I was going to stage an all-out grape-squeezing contest and pick "Signorina Vino," who would be not only the most beautiful girl in the valley but also the one whose dainty and talented bare feet trampled out the most juice from the white and purple and red grapes.

In Tulio's crew, who had about a hundred workers, half of them were born with cogliones. The other half were daughters of Eve, and of those fifty, I'd say that about twenty or maybe twenty-two were really lookers.

After the luncheon break, I went out to the fields in my jeans and tee-shirt, and I had a little soap-box meeting in which I announced the contest. Every girl taking part would get an extra day's pay, no matter what the results were. The winner would get two weeks' salary and plenty of T.V. and newspaper publicity, as well as a trophy that I myself would award. And I didn't mean the emblem of the order of my prick, either, although I was sure that Dad had personally managed to screw just about every worker for a good many years. He told me as much back in the days when we had a little communication together and before I'd taken off for the Bay area.

After all that was done, I phoned Philip Young at the bank and told him that I felt I could make the deadline and fork over the twenty-six grand. He expressed polite surprise. I would have until midnight of that day, which was damned decent of him. But I would have to pay down every penny of the balance by that time, or else.

Then about four o'clock that afternoon, I got into my Thunderbird and made the rounds of the TV stations, but big ones. There was CBS, NBC, and the big independent, KJZ-TV, which was a UHF channel and owned by that son of a bitch, Don Foster. His merger was just about going through, and soon the station would become one of ten which dominated California from San Diego to Eureka.

I had asked for the promotion director of the station, but instead I got ushered into Don Foster's office. His moustache was growing nicely, and he looked prissier than ever. He gave me a contemptuous sneer, listened to my enthusiastic outline of the harvest festival contest I was staging, and said, "We aren't interested in country bumpkin stuff, Venturi. This TV station is in the big time now, it's not just a 10,000-watter in Hanford. Radio stations like that will be happy to take all the stuff you can feed them. But you're not welcome here, and you personally will never be."

I was tempted to throw a punch at him, but it wouldn't do poor Sally any good. I just thanked him for his time and got the hell out of there. The other stations, however, were a great deal more cooperative.

By the end of the week, I had acceptances by wire from about five of the big wine and liquor wholesalers whom I'd met on my junket. If they liked the quality of merchandise at the festival, there was a pretty good chance they would place orders and buy and they might give me letters of credit on which I could draw at the bank to cover the deficit on the mortgage.

I still kept trying to get Madge Fryburg, and she was still acting unavailable. She had forgotten all about her vacation, she was working on cases for Dr. Franklin, who she suspected was coming down sick pretty soon from overwork, and she just didn't have time for social activities. I was almost tempted to ask her what about sexual, but it wouldn't have worked, because the tone of her voice didn't indicate that she was particularly interested. I wondered what the hell I had done to change her so drastically. But I just didn't have time to fool around with it any more. The time for decision was coming up real close, and I frankly was scared.

And the, about three days before the festival, on a Wednesday evening, to be exact, just as I was about to leave the office and tell faithful Dora Corlani she could call it quits for the day, in walked Brenda Corey. Jane Wilson at the switchboard blew her a kiss, and the two young women conferred for a moment in whispers, and then Brenda made her way through the swinging doors towards my office.

I was haggard and exhausted, I had a day's growth of beard, but to me she looked like prime pussy, and from the smile on her face I began to wonder if maybe she had finally succumbed to my virile charms.

Her silver-blonde hair was now done in a very sexy upsweep which left her nape bare, and she had golden earrings clipped to her lobes, and her lips were very red and humid and sexy. So was her dress. It was a mini-dress, showing about three inches of thigh, and her legs were bare, and she had white strap-on thong sandals. I shivered when I saw the way her calves flexed, and she gave me a teasing smile, seating herself in my chair, and crossed her legs so that I could admire even more of her bare flesh. As she adjusted her skirt, I caught a glimpse of a very gossamer pair of white pantie-briefs.

"Carl, you're quite a stranger," she reproached me. "I thought sure you'd call me for a date, but it's been ages."

"I know. I'm a working man these days, Brenda. Don't tell me you gave up the bank?"

"Oh no, heavens no!" she uttered a peal of silvery laughter and tilted back her head so that I could admire her throat. And I'd say that the top of the dress was rather low cut down to the valley of those gorgeous bombers of hers, and my pulses began to accelerate just a trifle. I'd eaten hardly any lunch, a very scanty breakfast, but I felt myself getting awfully hungry for what those gossamer panties concealed. "I'm on my vacation, you see. I've got another two weeks."

"Three weeks!" I whistled admiringly. "What I wouldn't give to be in your place. But on Saturday I've got a big harvest festival to be master of ceremonies over, and after that I might have to take a permanent vacation, depending on what your boss thinks about our efforts to raise dough."

"I know. But don't worry, I'm sure you'll make it. Mr. Young personally thinks you will, too. But I didn't come here for that, Carl dear."

I reached for a cigarette and I leaned forward, because what she had called me was quite out of character. "Oh?" I asked. "What did you come here for, then, Brenda honey?"

"To ask you to let me take part in your wine contest, Carl. You know, your foreman had been awfully nice to Jane and me. He apologized for-well, you know what he tried to do to Jane. We both decided it was best not to say any more about it and get unfortunate publicity, because Jane's so shy. But anyway, we did harvest some of our grapes, so I feel that in a way I'm a worker in your vineyards. And I would love to get in one of those casks and trample out the grapes and maybe win the prize. Oh, if I did win, you could give the money and the trophy and the other stuff to the girl who came in second. But I'd just love the chance. Say you will, dear?"

I was flabbergasted. The last person in the world I would have figured wanted to go into such an earthy contest, showing off her legs and everything else she had-because a lot of my girl workers don't wear panties, especially in hot August and early September- would have been Brenda Corey, that fastidious, aloof silver-blond. "Are you serious?"

She nodded. "Terribly so, dear. Why don't you take me to dinner, and we could talk about it?"

So the upshot of it was that I took Brenda Corey to dinner at the Hotel Californian, and then she insisted that I drive her over to my place. She made a tour of inspection of the house, but of course I saved my bedroom for the very last. I hadn't forgotten those grimaces of repugnance when I tried to neck and pet, and then the startling way she'd given me relief via a perfumed handkerchief. I still have it, by the way, a love souvenir.

Well, we finally made it into my bedroom, and when she saw all the pictures and illustrations, she gasped and blushed, then turned to me: "You're wicked! I shouldn't have come here at all."

"Probably not. Back in the middle ages, there used to be a motto of some royal family engraved on the hilt of a sword to the effect that it was never to be drawn except in honor or sheathed without having tasted blood. Suppose I were to open my fly and show you how much you excite me, Brenda? If I did that, it would be drawn in honor against your honor, but I promise you I wouldn't sheathe it until it had tasted what you've got to offer a man," I told her.

"Shall I tell you something, Carl dear?" she stepped very close to me, put an arm around my waist, and ran her right hand over my chest. "If you'll give me the chance to compete Saturday, I'll come up here again and then you can draw your sword and sheathe it Win or lose."

My prick began to ache and my heart to pound wildly. This aloof beauty, this patrician snob, was exactly the kind of pussymeat I secretly yearned to master. If I had this obsession about spanking girls, it was because of my sour-grapes experiences along the way. I'd done a lot of sublimating in my time, and I had thought quite a good deal about Brenda lately. She had begun to haunt my dreams. I could see her as a slave bound to the whipping post, blindfolded, and awaiting the executioner who would rip her garments from her and apply the lash. Not to the blood, not the way Tulio Verduga had whipped her young cousin Jane Wilson. But just enough to redden that proud flesh, enough to make her squirm and sob and beg for mercy, enough to make her plead to be fucked and to suck and do anything her master's heart should desire -as well as his cock!-if only the lash would be spared her.

I think that every virile man, somewhere in his makeup, has a yearning to own a female slave, if only for a dulsatory hour. Perhaps because they've never found a real true love, perhaps because I've been disillusioned about Sally Jeffries, now Foster, my spanko-mania had returned to haunt me and to be intensified in all my sexual longings. I glanced over at the wall, and all those pictures and illustrations from CORPORAL, and then back at lovely, exciting Brenda Corey. "Win or lose," I repeated. "No matter what happens at the contest, if I let you get those lovely legs into a cask, you'll come up here Saturday night ready to expect the worst?"

She nodded. "I'll do better than that," she whispered. "I'll give you a pledge in advance."

And then to my overwhelmed surprise and ecstasy, Brenda knelt down, took hold of my zipper and dragged it swiftly down, put a slim hand inside my work trousers and drew out my stiff and throbbing prick. Then, closing her eyes, she turned her cheek, and rubbed the angry, throbbing meatus up against the satiny smoothness of her flesh, turned her head slowly, so that I felt her chin brush against my cock-tip, and finally nuzzled it with her lips and pressed a long and lingering kiss upon the puckering slit through which the wine of my life would flow in a gushing torrent.

Then she rose, and while I crammed my agonized cock back into my fly, she murmured. "There, does that convince you, Carl darling? You can have me, all of me, any way you want, Saturday night, if you'll let me play games with the other girls."