Chapter 7

The geologists arrived much earlier than expected. Cathy answered the doorbell's ring at noon the next day and found herself looking at two deeply-tanned men. The older, a man of about forty, introduced himself as Weldon Formsbee.

"I'm with Lone Star Geology," he said. "This is Doug Holt, my assistant."

"Oh! I thought you were going to be here tomorrow!" Cathy said, recovering quickly. "Come on inside, won't you? I'm Cathy Hood."

"We were supposed to get here in the morning," Formsbee acknowledged, "but we finished up a lot sooner than we'd expected. So we just came on over."

"I'm glad you did," Cathy said. "Dad's been very anxious to see what you think about his drilling. I'll go get my stepmother and we'll drive you out to the rig, okay? Or would you rather get a room and go out tomorrow?"

"We might as well get started as soon as we can," Formsbee told her. "No sense in waiting around when we could be working."

Cathy found Elaine in the kitchen and told her of the visitors. Elaine came out, greeted them warmly and agreed to show them the way to the well. At her suggestion, Cathy rode with Doug in the geologists' car, following her and Formsbee in her station wagon. Cathy settled in beside the young man-he did not appear to be thirty and was very handsome in a wiry, leathery way-and found him to be an animated, engaging conversationalist. She also felt a strong sexual power flowing from him, a discovery that unsettled her to a considerable extent. She managed to hold up her end of the talk, though she knew that she must seem somewhat addle-minded at times, due to her discomfort at feeling herself being attracted to Holt.

The half-hour drive out to the well passed quickly enough. Formsbee and Holt carried small canvas satchels into the tool shed, where they changed into blue jeans, work shirts and scuffed boots. They donned hard hats upon leaving the tool shed and went over to the rig, where Dan Hood waited for them. Elaine and Cathy went over to the tool shed and rested in its minuscule shade.

"Mmmm, that Holt's quite a hunk, isn't he?" the woman said, giving Cathy a conspiratorial smile. "And with those jeans on, you can see that he's really well hung!"

Cathy said nothing to that, though she mentally agreed with her lewd-minded stepmother had an excellent point. She had not been aware of Dave's body, at least not to any noticeable extent, until he had emerged from the tool shed. The tight fitting jeans clung to his thighs and loins with stunning grace. Evidently he had doffed his underwear as well, because the large, prominent lump in the front of his jeans made it quite clear that only the thickness of blue denim hid his prick from view.

"If that first sight is any indication," Elaine continued, "he might even have more cock than Sven. Mmmm, wouldn't that be something to see? Or better yet, to feel? Just think about that, my dear!"

"Oh, he wouldn't be interested in me," Cathy protested. "You shouldn't say things like that!"

"I saw that look in his eyes," Elaine insisted. "Why, it wouldn't take very long before he was crawling all over you, Cathy! Yes, it wouldn't take much encouragement at all and he'd be dying to shove that big prick of his up your hot little cunt! You ought to think about it, dear. I doubt if you'll find a man hung like that just every day!"

Cathy turned away, embarrassed at the frankness of Elaine's conversation. She was never entirely sure, when the woman expressed herself in such frank language, whether she was serious or not. Even so, the notion remained firmly planted in her mind and continued to bother her. Dave had a much more mature air than Sven, for example, and that appealed to her. Boys her own age tended to bore her mightily and their desperate, inept fumbling with her body proved to be a great deal less than sexually exciting.

'You might as well head back in," Dan said to them after they had stood in the toolshed's shade for fifteen minutes. "Looks like they're going to be here a spell. And I reckon they can find their own way back into town. No sense in you two staying out here and getting all sunburned for nothing."

They accepted his advice and returned to their house. Dan had a perplexed expression when he returned that evening. The new rock strata, he reported, could mean either good news or bad and there was no really efficient way of determining which, apart from continuing to drill. Formsbee had been more skeptical, pointing out that the percentages indicated an absence of oil.

"That young feller, that Holt, he liked the looks of it a little more." Hood said. "He claimed the rock was a little off-color and that sounded good to him. Me, I just don't know which way to think."

"But meanwhile you keep drilling," Elaine said.

"Sure. It don't look bad enough to call it off," Hood replied. "They're sending the samples back to Dallas for some more tests. After that they can tell a little more about what we've got. I don't know, maybe I ought to take up that offer from the Royster people."

Royster Oil, a fairly large independent producer, had made Dan a respectable offer for his rights to the well. Accepting the offer would give him a small profit but it would also cut him off from the real wealth that would be his if the well came through. That "if" was becoming a potentially expensive word and he hated thinking about the possible cost to him of each of those two letters.

"Maybe you ought to take them up on the offer," Elaine suggested, repeating the position she had earlier taken. "Take what you can and settle for that."

"I just don't know," Hood said. "I got this feeling deep down inside my gut about that well. I can't help but think there's something there. No, I think I'll hang on for a while longer and see what happens next." Changing the subject, he added that he had invited Formsbee and Holt to the house for after dinner drinks, a statement that brought a sharp pang to Cathy's heart. She looked over at her stepmother and saw a devilish light glinting in the woman's eyes. Knowing what the woman was thinking, she blushed slightly but refused to rise to the bait.

Formsbee proved to be only too willing to spend the evening retailing oil business gossip, a topic very close to Dan Hood's heart. Holt contributed a little to the conversation but soon dropped out, focusing his attention on Cathy. They drifted into the kitchen, where they sat by the table and moved on to other subjects. Cathy felt her panties growing damp as she sat and listened to the engaging young man, drawing him out with artfully phrased questions that enabled her to learn a great deal about him.

Doug Holt had wavered between law and geology throughout undergraduate school at the University of Oklahoma. He had even tried a year of law school and then settled on geology; the latter gave him more chance to be outdoors, he said, and that fact had decided the matter for him. He had been working for the consulting firm three years, he said, and intended setting up his own firm within the next two years. He was not a company man, he told her, and he much preferred being hi own boss.

"How about you?" he said. "What's in your future?"

"I don't know," Cathy replied. "As soon as finish up this correspondence course and get my diploma I'm going to have to decide on something I'm pretty sure it won't be college, though."

"And you're just sixteen!" Holt marveled "Man, you could have fooled me! I'd have sworn you were twenty or twenty-one!"

Cathy was used to that. Perhaps it was her absence from other girls her own age, or being around grownups so much, that accounted for her mature air, she thought, but in any case people generally guessed her to be five or six years older than she actually was.

"And I was just trying to get my nerve up to ask you out for dinner!" he said, grinning broadly.

"You needn't worry about that," she told him "I've often gone out with men older than me. Dad doesn't mind, not as long as he trusts and likes them."

"All right, if you say so," he said, giving her another of those thoroughly engaging grins. "How about going out with me after we get back? I'm assuming that we'll be back in the neighborhood in a week or so, you understand."

"I'd love to," she told him. "Just let me know when you get here!" She felt a warm glow of pride as they went back into the living room to rejoin the others.

Holt and Formsbee were to leave early the next morning. They planned to drive to Hobbs, where they would meet a company plane for their return to Dallas. Dan Hood rose early the next morning and drove out to his well. As far as Cathy could see, the geologists' preliminary report gave him no reason to be cheerful, but he kissed her goodbye that morning with all his customary gusto and got into his pickup, smiling broadly.

The telephone call came just after noon. Cathy and Elaine were sitting down to a light lunch when the telephone rang. Cathy answered it since she was nearest the instrument and was thus the recipient of the news. The foreman of the drilling crew, a man she had known since childhood, gulped at hearing her voice but he went ahead. Dan Hood, he told her, had apparently had a heart attack a half hour before and none of the crew's attempts to save him had had any effect on his stilled heart.

"We just done all we could but there wasn't nothing more to do," the gruff, hard-handed man told her. "I sure am sorry about it."

Cathy thanked him in a numbed voice and hung up. Turning to Elaine, she barely managed to blurt out the news before she completely collapsed. The two women consoled each other as best they could. Distraught though she was, Cathy managed to see that Elaine's grief was genuine, a fact that surprised her considerably. She would not have expected that from her stepmother, especially since she had witnessed the woman's readiness to engage in bizarre sexual acts with several other people.

"I know, you think I'm just a whore because I've played all those fuck-and-suck games with Ken and Kevin and the others," Elaine said, drying her eyes, "but damn it, your father was an awfully good man! I did love him! It wasn't his fault that I ... well, that I wanted more sex than he could give me!"

Cathy saw that Elaine probably had loved her father, though not in the way that she had been taught to expect that a wife should love her husband. That discovery sobered her and, somehow, helped her to bear her own grief more easily. Later that afternoon they recognized that they would have to begin making arrangements for Hood's funeral, a task which could not be evaded. Cathy's father had only one living relative, so far as they knew; this was a much older sister who had been living in a Seattle nursing home for the last four years. Thus the arrangements could be kept to a minimum and they were spared a considerable amount of anguish.

"Look, it happened and while I never for one second wished for anything like his death," Elaine told her one afternoon, "we can't bring him back. I would if I could but you and I know we can't. I say we've got to toughen ourselves up and go ahead with living. And I sort of think that's the way Dan would have wanted it, too!"

Elaine helped by seeing to it that Cathy had plenty of duties to fulfill, not only around their house but also in connection with the drilling rig. The crew had taken off a full twenty-four hours out of respect for their boss, as well as closing down on the morning of the funeral, but everyone saw that the drilling had to continue. Cathy quickly learned that there were a million errands to be run, chores to be performed, in connection with the complex operation and she was given her share of the work.

Elaine proved to be a surprisingly capable businesswoman. Unfamiliar with the oil business before her marriage to Dan Hood, she had evidently picked up a great deal from him and showed that she was nobody's fool when it came to directing the men. Within a week of her late husband's funeral, she was in the oil business up to her ears, as was Cathy, and they both found it fascinating. She spent nearly an hour every day in long conversations with Weldon Formsbee, the consulting geologist hired to analyze the core samples, and soon announced that Formsbee and Doug Holt would arrive in a couple of days.

"They're going to be up in Hobbs again," Elaine explained, "and it seemed easy enough for them to run down here. They'll probably stay overnight and leave late the next day."

Cathy felt a tremor of interest run through her body at the thought of seeing Holt again. She clearly remembered the way he had affected her during their earlier meeting, as well as the surprising interest he had shown in her, and she could not deny that she looked forward to his visit. The press of the work had been so heavy that she had had little time to think about her sexual needs and she had gone several days without giving more than a passing thought to the normally volatile, insatiable slit between her thighs.

Formsbee and Holt arrived at noon. Cathy met them at her house, since Elaine had gone out to the well to check the arrival of some additional equipment, and she directed them to the well. The geologists took time enough to express their condolences for her father's death, and Doug Holt suggested that she join him for dinner that night. She hesitated only a second before accepting the invitation and afterward spent a good bit of time in reflecting on the way his deep blue eyes had fastened on her when he had extended the invitation.

He likes me, I'm sure he does, she told herself that afternoon. The way he was looking at me, a guy doesn't look at a girl like that unless she turns him on! But me? Could he really get interested in me? Mightn't I be too young for him? And what would he think if he knew that I wasn't ... that I'd been doing all those terrible things with Sven and Birgitta and Kevin and . and all of them? God, he'd think I was just awful, I know he would! Ooooh, he's such a hunk; if he'd asked me I think I'd have gone down on him right there!

Her encounter with Doug Holt had been traumatic in the extreme. Even with Formsbee sitting in the same room with them she had felt a compelling desire for the handsome man and had he attempted to touch her she would no doubt have surrendered on the spot. As soon as the pair had left-they had declined her offer to guide them, explaining that they remembered the way well enough-the girl retired to her bedroom. There she stripped off every article of clothing and made for her bed, where she spent nearly an hour in stroking, rubbing and caressing her turbulent pussy. Again and again she brought herself to orgasm, heaving and rubbing against her fingers with seemingly insatiable desire, but she could never attain the state of total satiation which her body demanded.

Thus, when Holt drove by that evening to collect her for the dinner date, Cathy was still in a state of sexual desire that gnawed and burned relentlessly. Her pussy and breasts ached dully, constantly reminding her of her unfulfilled desires, and a steady trickle of clear, slippery musk coursed from the tingling lips of her pussy. She felt that even the slightest touch would turn the embers of lusty fever into a raging, roaring inferno that would consume her within a second, yet she hungered for exactly that touch. She knew that Holt would need only a single caress, perhaps even a look and a suggestive phrase, and she would melt completely, leaving herself completely defenseless and open to him.