Chapter 1
"I'll see you later, Daddy. Kathy and I are going to the movies. I'll probably be home about six, okay?"
Tim Daltrey looked up absently from his desk in the sunny living room of his ranch-style house in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In front of him were piles of neatly sorted bills and receipts, and an open accounting ledger. Although it was only early May, the sun pouring through the wide bay windows was oppressively hot, and the back of Tim's light, cotton-knit pullover clung to his lean, muscular back, damp with sweat.
"Fine, honey," he murmured, turning toward the doorway and the sound of his teenage daughter's voice. Then his words trailed off and his eyes opened wide. "Beth, you're certainly not planning to go out like that, are you?"
"Sure, why not?" his blonde, blue-eyed offspring asked innocently.
Tim looked her over appraisingly. Lately it seemed that every time he looked at her, his fifteen year old daughter was a little older. And today he was positively unnerved as his eyes roved over her lithe young frame, clad in a pair of low, hip-hugging, light blue bellbottoms and a sleeveless red cotton top that left her tanned and curvaceous midriff bare, and clung to her rapidly developing young breasts like a second skin. She obviously wasn't even wearing a brassiere, for from all the way across the room, the thirty-nine year old, sandy-haired businessman could see the outline of her tiny nipples. With a fringed bag slung over her shoulders, thong sandals on her feet, and her eyes covered by a pair of large tortoise-shell sunglasses, she looked to his experienced eyes like a latter-day Lolita.
"What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" Beth Daltrey asked again, coming all the way into the room. "Don't you like it Dad?"
Seeing her in motion only made things worse, for his daughter moved with a natural, hip-swinging grace that belied her years, and was all the more appealing for being totally unconscious. For one thing Tim was absolutely sure of was that his lovely young daughter was completely innocent. He had that to be thankful for, anyway.
"It's not that I don't like it, baby," he said gently. "In fact, I think it's very pretty. And if you were going by car, or with Kathy's parents. I don't think I'd mind. But on the bus into the center of Albuquerque on a Sunday afternoon well, I don't think it's appropriate, do you? I mean, it's bound to attract a lot of attention, because you're a very pretty girl, and not necessarily the kind of attention you'd like."
Beth thought for a minute. "I guess you're right," she finally replied. She did attract a lot of attention, particularly from the local boys who hung out at the soda shops in town. She even found it a little frightening the way they looked at her sometimes, exchanging low remarks to each other as she walked by and laughing lewdly. It didn't seem to matter what she was wearing, though. "I'll go change."
"That's a good girl," Tim smiled. "And have a good time this afternoon, okay? Do you have enough money?"
"Yeah," Beth called, on her way upstairs, "no problem."
No problem. The words echoed in Tim's ears as he turned back to his desk. They were exactly the words he would choose to describe his relationship with his pretty blonde daughter, if he had to. He was amazed at how cooperative and reasonable she was. Most girls in their teens, he knew, were a constant source of worry and aggravation to their parents, but not Beth. She received consistently good marks at the private girls' school she attended not spectacular, but good. And since the death of her mother three years ago the mother whose fair, almost glacial beauty she had so obviously inherited, Beth had devoted most of her free time to making her father as happy and unlonely as she possibly could. In fact, he finally had to insist that she spend more of her free time doing something for herself, and even then her choice had been an after-school job at the local library to save money for college. Yes, Beth was a prize, he had no doubt of it, and one of the main things he wanted out of life now was to make sure that her future was as happy and untroubled as he possibly could.
The thought brought the father rudely back to the papers on the desk in front of him. There was no way of avoiding the fact that his business, a small electronics firm that he and his wife had inherited from her father, was in trouble. Income just didn't match outgo, and to make matters worse, National Machine Products, a larger competitor, was underselling him in an effort to force him to sell out to them. He'd already turned them down twice. It went against his grain to see so many good small businesses taken over by anonymous corporations. But he didn't know how much longer he could hold out without a large injection of capital, and he was already in hock to the local bank up to his neck. At the rate things were going, there was no sense in kidding himself. Nothing short of a miracle would keep the company afloat beyond the end of the year, no matter how hard he worked.
Just then the phone rang.
"I'll get it, Daddy," Beth called, on her way down the stairs. He heard her pick up the phone, and a few seconds later she called, "It's for you."
"Who is it?"
"I don't know, a lady. I have to run or I'll be late. 'Bye, Daddy!"
Wearily, Tim got up from the desk and made his way into the hall. Who the hell was calling him on a Sunday afternoon? Probably some telephone canvasser.
"Hello," he said, a little inhospitably.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a low feminine voice, with just the slightest trace of a Latin accent, said, "Hello, Tim. This is Rose."
"Rose? Rose who?" Beth's tall blond father asked. He didn't know anyone named Rose.
The woman laughed, a soft musical sound that was vaguely familiar. "I'm disappointed," she replied teasingly. "The last time I saw you, you said you'd remember me always."
Tim frowned, puzzled. He still couldn't place the voice, and he was sure he didn't know anyone named Rose, except. . .
"Say something else," he asked. "Maybe then I'll be able to place you."
The sultry-voiced female responded by humming a few bars of a popular song of the fifties, "Vaya Con Dios," and suddenly it all came back to him in a rush of memory.
"Not Rosa Molina?" he asked incredulously. "It can't be!"
"But it is," his caller replied warmly. "How are you, Tim?"
"Well, I'm shocked, that's how I am. No one's seen hide nor hair of you for...how long has it been? My God, Rosa, years!"
"Sixteen years, to be exact," Rose replied, "and it's not Rosa anymore, it's Rose."
"Rose. Okay, Rose. I hardly know what to say. When did you get in? Where are you staying? What have you been doing all this time?"
She laughed again, and Tim could feel himself becoming riveted to the sound of her voice, the way he had once been before, years ago.
"I got in two days ago, I'm here for the summer, and I'm staying out at the Rancho. As for the rest, it's much too long to try to describe over the phone."
"The Rancho? But that place has been closed down for years."
"Really, Tim, you must not be keeping up with things. Surely you heard it had changed hands?"
"Yeah, now that you mention it, I did hear something like that, but there've been so many rumors over the years, I guess I didn't pay attention."
"Well, I own it now, and I'm having it rebuilt as a summer place."
Tim whistled appreciatively. "You sound as though you've done all right, Rose."
"Not badly. And you?"
"Oh, so-so," Tim replied evasively. "You know how business is..."
"Maybe you married the wrong girl after all, eh?"
Tim paused, startled. "Myrna died a few years ago, by the way," he finally said.
"Yes, I read about it in the papers. Was that your daughter who answered the phone?"
"Yes, yes that was Beth. And...what about you? Is your...husband with you?"
"No, only my chauffeur, Jose. I've been much too busy to get married."
Tim couldn't quite explain why, but that struck him as good news. He found himself trying to imagine what his feline-voiced caller looked like now, and he was more than a little curious as to what had happened to her. It sounded like a great deal.
"Listen, Rose, I really want to see you. I have a business meeting tomorrow over lunch, unfortunately, but could you stop by my office say around four? We could go for a drink and catch up on each other."
"I thought you'd never ask. Four sounds lovely. Same address?"
"Yeah. Do you still remember it?"
"Oh yes. Until tomorrow, then?"
"Until tomorrow...and Rose, it's really wonderful talking to you again."
For me too, Tim. In fact, I've been looking forward to it for a long time."
Their conversation ended, and Tim stood for a moment after he replaced the receiver, gazing thoughtfully off into space. Rosa Molina! He'd never expected to hear from her again. In fact, he was surprised that she was so warm and friendly after what had happened. He hadn't exactly been kind in the past. But from the way she sounded, she'd evidently decided to let bygones be bygones.
On his way back into the living room, he became conscious of a pleasant throbbing in his loins, and realized that his penis was straining against the material of his trousers. He couldn't suppress a wry smile as he sat down in one of the overstuffed armchairs in the living room and lit a cigarette. That was always the effect Rosa had had on him, right from the start. Closing his eyes, he let himself drift back in memory to the last time he had seen her, sixteen years ago . . .
It was early June, and Tim Daltrey waited in the shadows outside the Rancho Albuquerque guest house, watching a window on the very top floor. As soon as Rosa was finished with her kitchen work, she would go back to her room, light a lamp, and open the curtains. That was the signal for him to come in the service entry and make his way up the back stairs.
It was a routine they had been following for six months, ever since he had first met her at one of the Mexican coffee shops in town, favorite haunts for students at the junior college, like himself, who were looking for something a little more exotic than they could find at the more conventional sections of town.
From the moment he laid eyes on Rosa Molina, the good-looking blonde youth was determined to possess her. She was the sexiest, most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, with a petite, but definitely well-rounded body, olive-skin, sparkling dark eyes and a mane of thick, wavy black hair that hung down almost to her waist. Only sixteen, she was a chambermaid at the hotel, living there because the long hours made the journey into her parent's rundown flat in Albuquerque impractical.
At first everything had been idyllic, the fulfillment of every romantic fantasy he'd ever had about "his first affair". Rosa was as smitten with him as he was with her, and after two months of meeting her secretly, the guest house maid had finally opened herself to him as completely as he could wish.
However, recently things had gotten complicated. For one thing, his dark-eyed Latin mistress had fallen in love with him. At least that was what she said when she began hinting, then openly asking, about marriage. For awhile Tim occasionally fantasized about running off with her in the best romantic tradition, it was never more than a flight of imagination, bred primarily by freshman courses in romance fiction. At heart he was a realist, and Rosa definitely didn't fit into the realistic scheme of his life. In fact, he'd been looking for a suitable way to ease his way out of their affair for more than a month, but none had presented itself.
Tonight, however, he had no more time to spare. For in addition to his secret liaison with Rosa, Tim had also been prospecting in the more acceptable quarters of town, with considerable success. Myrna Evans, the daughter of a prominent local businessman, was not only in love with him, but also blonde, blue-eyed, well educated...and very pregnant, a state of affairs that called for immediate action. So immediate, in fact, that the announcement of their impending marriage was to appear in the local paper the following morning. Tim was dreading the encounter with Rosa tonight, the more so since Rosa had let him know several times previously that her fits of jealous temper were no less passionate and violent than her tempestuous lovemaking. Although in his own mind, his actions were perfectly logical and justifiable, he had scant hopes of convincing Rosa of this. In fact, it was with a sinking, queasy feeling that he awaited the appearance of the light in her window. At last it came, and stamping out his cigarette in the desert sand, he made his way upstairs.
Much to his relief, Rosa greeted him warmly when he came through the door. He'd been afraid maybe she'd already heard the news. The grapevine among the Mexicans in the town was incredible. But she turned from the little table that served as her bureau and dressing table with a warm smile and slipped into his arms, hugging him tightly, and standing on tiptoe to plant welcoming kisses on his cheeks and mouth with her full, sensuous lips.
"Oh, mio cuore, I am so happy you are here! I have some wonderful news to tell you tonight," she burst out, leading him into the room with both hands, her eyes dancing.
"I...I have something to tell you, too, Rosa," Tim began seriously, avoiding the distraction presented by her softly rounded body, clad only in a knee-length, ruffled petticoat and an embroidered white cotton chemise that looked totally inadequate to contain the full-rounded big mounds of her melon-like breasts. Her hair, loosened from the neat braid she wore when she was working, fell down her back in waves, like a dark river.
"But you sound sad," she said, her eyes concerned.
"Well I am, a little."
"Then you must tell me your news first, because mine is so good it will make you forget all your sadness, okay?"
She sat down on the bed, against the pillows, her knees tucked under her chin, and motioned to him to join her. He sat down a little bit away, averting his eyes from her shapely thighs and the tantalizing flashes of thickly curling dark bush of pubic hair that he could see up between her legs.
"Rosa...I'm afraid I haven't been completely honest with you," he began nervously, looking down at his hands which he was absently clasping and unclasping. "I...I have been seeing another girl."
He felt rather than saw her body stiffen at this news, but she seemed to make a great effort to control her reaction.
"Yes?" she replied a little coolly.
"Yes. I...I should have told you before, but I just didn't have the nerve, I guess."
"So? And is this your big news?"
"Well, there's more to it than that, actually. You see, this girl is...is going to have my baby and I...I have to do the right thing by her, you know what I mean?"
He stopped, unable to bring himself to actually say the words. He wanted to gauge Rosa's reaction, too, and he glanced over at her. She was sitting stock still, her eyes wide, like a statue except for the steady rise and fall of her haughtily up-thrust breasts.
"And what is this right thing you think you must do?" she asked, closing her eyes, and speaking very softly.
"Well, it's obvious, isn't it? I mean I can't just let this girl have a baby and it has no father or anything, can I?"
Without answering, Rosa got up from the bed and walked to the window, her back to him.
"Who is this girl?"
"I don't really think that's relevant..."
"Relevant? What means this big word? You must 'scuse me I'm only Mexican maid, I don't know all these big college words. Maybe this girl, she understands them. She's a gringo, isn't she? Isn't she?"
Tim could feel himself growing red with embarrassment, and he wished the scene was over. At the same time, in some secret corner of himself, it was flattering to see how jealous his dark-eyed voluptuous young mistress was. Hell, he thought, men have been getting in situations like this forever. It's not my fault I got two chicks hot for me.
"Well, yes, she is," he replied.
"It's that Myrna Evans, why don't you admit it? That blonde puta, that whore. I should have put a knife in her belly the first time you went out with her!"
Rosa was consumed with a mixture of fury and misery, and although Tim's initial impulse was to defend his intended bride, he couldn't bring himself to be angry with Rosa, particularly as he could see tears welling up in her eyes.
"Rosa, I'm sorry...I didn't mean it to happen this way..." he began lamely, going over to where she stood and standing helplessly behind her, uncertain of what to do.
Suddenly the curvaceous Latin beauty whirled around and threw herself in his arms. "You don't have to marry her," she pleaded, the tears spilling over and cascading down her cheeks. "We can go away, now, tonight! We go to Mexico, to my uncle's place. We can get work, I will work too! Then when we have money we can send her some for the baby.
Please Tim, please, I work for the rest of my life for you if you come away with me!"
As gently as he could, Tim extricated himself from her embrace. "Rosa...be practical...we can't do that. Besides, I've given my word. I can't go back on it now."
There was a long, tension-filled pause after he spoke as the scantily clad chambermaid absorbed his words.
"You've already asked this woman to marry you?" she said at last, her voice sounding like a string, pulled taut to the breaking point.
Tim nodded. "It's going to be in the papers tomorrow morning. I...I wanted to tell you before you heard it from somebody else."
Rosa's eyes narrowed and her mouth fell open in disbelief. She looked at Tim as though she were seeing him for the first time.
"Tomorrow? Then you have known...for weeks...and still you come here to me at night, as though nothing is happening? You make love to me, and all the while you know you are marrying another girl? Is that true?"
"Well I...it's not so simple as that, Rosa," Tim began defensively, turning away and moving across the room to avoid the penetrating glance of her dark eyes. In actual fact, that was the way it was, but the good-looking blond youth couldn't bring himself to admit it outright. He was still formulating excuses in his mind when an angry outburst of Spanish burst from Rosa's lips, whose tone communicated her feelings adequately even though he couldn't understand most of the words. And then an intuitive sense of danger made him wheel suddenly, just in time to catch the glint of metal in Rosa's hand as she hurled herself across the room at him like a whirlwind.
"I kill you, you son of a bitch," she half wept, half shouted, as he seized her wrists in his hands, twisting her knife-wielding fist up and away from his person.
"Drop it, Rosa! For God's sake, drop it!" he commanded, scarcely knowing what to do. An instant later the knife clattered to the floor, and he released the pressure on her hands. The enraged chambermaid immediately shifted her attack from the knife to her sharp nails, and before Tim had time to defend himself, she raked them over the left side of his face, clawing at him like an animal.
Suddenly angry himself, as though the sudden flow of blood had released a subterranean barbarian response in him, Tim grappled with the wildly flailing girl again, twisting her arms behind her and trying to avoid her flying feet and her teeth which, when her lips weren't hurling curses at him, were almost as dangerous as the knife had been. For a few seconds they struggled together, until finally Tim managed to propel her over to the bed, force her onto it face down, and holding her arms tightly pinned above her head, subdued her wildly violent form by throwing his own weight on top of her.
Tim was never sure exactly how the next sequence of events happened. He knew he shouldn't have let them happen, but he seemed not to have any control. He meant only to hold her still until she calmed down, and then get out of her room with as much dignity as he could still muster. But as he lay on top of her, his youthful big cock pressed hard against her firmly rounded buttocks, half naked where her petticoat had slipped upward during their fight, he became suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to fuck her, then and there. His penis swelled and thickened in his trousers, and a fiery heat wound up through his loins like a serpent, making his heart beat faster and the blood pound in his temples like a drum. Often before, when they wrestled playfully, their struggles had ended on the mattress of Rosa's single bed, and the affectionate struggle between them had heightened their sexual pleasure. But never had the young junior college student felt anything like the sensual torrent that now charged his every muscle with new strength, and filled his brain with dark lust. He felt like a barbarian chieftain fresh from battle, claiming his prize-woman from among the vanquished.
Moving with an instinctive will, he pulled Rosa's wrists together so he could grip them with one hand. Then he levered his body up and with the other hand first unzipped the fly of his pants and yanked them down to his thighs, together with his jockey shorts, so that his big thick cock sprang erect, swaying blindly in the air beneath his belly. Then he flicked Rosa's petticoat up, carelessly throwing it nearly over her head so that the entire expanse of her rounded, olive-skinned full buttocks and thighs were nakedly exposed to his gaze. His prick gave an excited lurch as he looked at her naked flanks, and his stomach turned over the lewd excitement.
On hearing the sound of his zipper opening and feeling the cool evening air on her naked flesh, Rosa jerked with surprise, as though she suddenly sensed what he had in mind and couldn't believe it. She tried to wriggle away, but Tim ignored her struggles, once more pinning her down with his weight and holding her wrists firmly, gripping the throbbing girth of his blood-engorged long staff with his other hand and guiding it upward between her legs, to the moist, curl-fringed entrance of her vagina.
"You have no shame," Rosa moaned weakly through her tears as she felt his knees shove her legs wider apart, and the head of his prick graze lustily against her defenseless cuntal split. "You have no shame!"
Oblivious to her outraged moans and sighs, Tim pressed forward, guiding his lustily throbbing ten inch prick of male hardness into her soft wet vaginal opening. He felt her whole body quiver as the thick knob head of his penis penetrated past the tight entrance, and involuntarily her sphincter muscles tightened around it, drawing him in, despite her conscious protests. With a flash of dark pride, Tim realized she wanted it! Even though it was shameful, almost rape, her body craved his big hot cock of male flesh shoved all the way up inside her cunt from behind.' Levering his hips up slightly he pulled back a little, then inched forward again, teasingly, rotating his pelvis in a lewd corkscrew motion and savoring the feeling of his thick foreskin pulling back, stretching painfully, then snaking forward again over the sensitized knob of his hotly pulsing staff. A low moan burst from Rosa's throat, a wild animal sound that excited him even more.
Slowly he began to saw in and out of her, each thrust taking him further and further up into her helpless cunt, occasionally plunging forward roughly, then pulling back, his cock turning and twisting like a screwdriver as it explored every inch of her steadily moistening channel. As always, Rosa opened to him like a flower, even raising her buttocks slightly so that his aroused big cock went even deeper, until he felt its thick knob head touching the hard surface of her cervix. Now his rhythm changed, increasing in tempo and force, until he was ramming into her from behind with the steady beat of a jackhammer, his hips swinging easily and his tight, hairy big balls slapping lewdly against her naked inner thighs with each stroke. Easing his upper torso down over her back, he brushed aside her thick mane of dark hair and the folds of her upturned petticoat and began planting nips and bites on her naked shoulder and the nape of her neck, making the helpless Mexican girl writhe with a mixture of pleasure and emotional pain.
"Oh you sweet piece of arse," he murmured, while his lust-heated ten inch cock continued its obscene probing of her cuntal depths, "you have the sweetest cunt in Albuquerque. I could eat you full of ice cream, Rosa baby, from now till kingdom come, if it weren't for Myrna being knocked up. If I could do what I want to do, I'd just spend all my time with my big cock shoved up inside your sweet little pussy filling it with spunk...uuunnnnggghhh Christ, it feels so good, so tight...but it just won't work...I can't go off and farm in Mexico, and we can't get married and stay here. Folks wouldn't ever accept it, you know that...but I'll never forget you, Rosa, and the way your tight little cunt feels wrapped around my cock...I'll never forget it, baby...oh...ooohh...oooohhhh shit!"
His soft, almost hypnotic monologue was cut short by a sudden heated explosion in his balls, and the lust-driven youth became suddenly rigid as his hips drove back and forth, back and forth, harder and harder, feeling his approaching orgasm surround him from all sides. Rosa had become perfectly still while he whispered his strangely salacious words, and now, as he reached the peak of excitement, her body responded, but somehow mechanically, her rounded buttocks moving back to meet his forward thrusts, her small hands gripping tightly onto the bedclothes, but her mind seeming far away, as though disconnected from her body.
"Oh, yeah! Yeah, that's it, fuck back you wild little cunt, fuck me back, move that arse baby! Oh Christ, I'm cumming! I'm gonna shoot my big load and flood you with it! Ah ah aaaaaahhhh!! ! "
Oblivious to whatever his dark-haired mistress might be feeling, Tim felt the world suddenly grind to a halt, as though the force of his ejaculation hurtled him outward, out of time and space into another dimension where he was conscious only of the intense, searing pleasure that accompanied the release of his viscous potent seed into the acquiescently pumping cuntal interior of the half naked, tawny-skinned girl beneath him. He'd never felt anything like it in his young life, this triumphant explosion of pure sensual freedom, as his arched and tautened body drove forward with the last remaining ounce of his strength filling her cunt to overflowing with thick white cum.
And then it was over. Breathing heavily, he fell forward again on Rose's trembling body, his body feeling as though it had been cleansed of all tension as his cock softened within Rose's semen-flooded vagina, and then slipped out, trailing a thick lewd trickle of pearly cum from its knob. For a long moment they lay there, until Tim, becoming aware of time again, spoke.
"If I let you up now, are you going to try to kill me again?" he asked.
Numbly Rose shook her head no, still lying on the bed, unmoving, her eyes closed.
"You have killed me first," she murmured weakly. "The dead have no more passion."
Although her words were strange, Tim took them as an assurance that her anger was, for the moment, passed. Fleetingly he thought that a good fuck could work wonders, as he clambered off her reclining body and pulled up his pants. All the time he was dressing. Rose neither moved or looked at him, and when he was ready to leave, he stood awkwardly in the center of the room, looking down at her immobile form, her buttocks still naked like two shimmering half-moons in the dim light of the hotel room with his abundant sperm leaking from her well fucked cunt.. . Reaching down, he gently covered her nakedness with her tattered petticoat, wrinkled and damp from being pressed between their tightly locked bodies throughout their torrid copulation.
"Well, I guess I'll be going now," he murmured.
When Rose didn't respond, he reached into his back pocket for his wallet, took out three twenties and placed them on her dressing table where she'd find them after he was gone.
"You take care of yourself, now. Rose," he began again, going over to the bed and leaning down as though to kiss her good-bye.
For the first time the sexually assaulted young girl reacted, pulling away from him to the far corner of the bed.
"Go, if you're going," she commanded in a steely voice. "Leave me alone!"
Startled, Tim eased himself out the door and down the back stairs for the last time . . .
In the living room of his comfortably furnished suburban home, Tim Daltrey slowly let his mind drift back to the present. How strange it was, to hear from Rosa...Rose. . . again after all these years. His memories of their torrid youthful affair seemed to belong to another world, another person. Looking back, he marveled at his callousness when he was young, indeed, he even felt his cheeks redden at the recollection of how he had walked out of Rosa's life without even a backward glance. Of course, it had been easy to forget her, since life had moved so quickly. Barely eight months later, Beth was born, and then he had become so involved in business and family matters that he had no time to think of the past. Sometimes, at night, he had remembered, particularly after an unsatisfying session of lovemaking with Myrna, who, although she fulfilled her "marital duties," as she called them, never seemed to enjoy it particularly. Then, as he smoked a last cigarette in their clean-smelling bedroom, her sleeping form turned away from him on the bed, he often found his thoughts traveling to his voluptuous first love, and wondering what had happened to her. Once he heard that she'd left town, but no one seemed to know where.
"Well now she's back," he mused aloud, feeling a kind of excitement and anticipation at the thought of seeing her again that he hadn't felt in a long time. "Fate is funny. It certainly is funny."
His reverie was interrupted by the sound of the hall clock chiming four. He'd been daydreaming for over an hour. He went back to his desk and once again confronted the piles of receipts and the columns of figures. At least Rosa's call gave him incentive to finish, so he would be free tomorrow afternoon when she came to his office.
Even as he sat down, however, he found a corner of his mind couldn't pull away from that evening at the Rancho so long ago. I wonder what she had to tell me that night, he thought. It never did come out, did it? Then, brushing the thought aside, he gave his full attention to his work.