Chapter 4

The nurse who let Jeff into his father's room had red hair that looked real. It was light in shade and she wore it in a whirl around the top of her head. She had the complexion of a real redhead, also-delicate and dusted with freckles.

This was not all she had going for her.

Her eyes were saucy green and her figure in the starched snug uniform would have been top-heavy except for the fact that her hips flared nicely. She was a lot of girl, all the way up and down, and she smiled in a way that was almost indecent at the entrance to a dying man's bedroom.

Jeff filed her in his brain for future reference and stepped through the doorway. She closed the door behind him.

The elder Bardell lay under a plastic oxygen tent. There was another nurse-an older woman with gray hair-seated beside his bed.

She stood up and told Jeff, "Please try not to tire him."

She opened a flap at the side of the tent. The equipment kept wheezing.

"Hello, Dad," Jeff said.

The old man turned slightly on his pillow, swinging his clouded gaze to Jeff's face. He was very pale. There was a hopelessness to his features now, but the old toughness was still there, too.

He moved his lips, but no sound came out.

He tried again and this time spoke, but he sounded as if his tongue were frozen and he seemed to have little breath to use.

"You've seen . . . Bunyan?"

"Yes, Dad."

"He'll tell you . . . what you need to know. Follow... his advice. Kelly, at the plant, will . . . help you there. He's a good man."

"Dad, listen to me. I don't want to run the business. I want to go back to Los Angeles."

The old man's eyes changed and Jeff saw the liciousness he had seen the last time they had met in L.A. That look aroused the fullness of his resentment as it had before.

"You're staying!" he croaked. "You'll do ... what I say! If you don't, I'll cut you off."

Jeff glared at him.

"It's time you . . . did something with your life. Past time. I carried on the business .. . from my father. You'll carry it on ... from me."

Jeff remained beside the bed for a few more moments, then turned on his heel and walked to the door without another word.

Just outside, the redhead was waiting. She sailed. "Doctor Wickam can see you now." As she turned, one large round breast rubbed against his arm." "Are you going to be staying in Cannon Oaks?" she asked as they walked along the barren white corridor.

"I don't know yet. My wife and I are here for a day or so."

"Oh."

He was amazed by the reaction his mention of a wife had drawn. He had done it intentionally for amusement value. The girl was thinking now. Damn! He's married. He's going to inherit all that money, and he has a wife who will get it. If Jeff decided to go after the girl later, he would make clear what sort of marriage he had. But this would cool her down for the time being. He did not like aggressive females-especially the ones who had marriage in mind. His talk with Doctor Wickam bore out, at greater length and in greater detail, what the doctor had told him over the phone. While all hope for his father's recovery was not gone, it now amounted to the slenderest threads. If the case developed as the early prognosis indicated, the elder Bardell would survive only a few more days.

Jeff rejoined Shirley in the hospital waiting room and rode with her back to her office. He had to cool his heels for a few minutes while Bunyan finished with a client, then was ushered into the lawyer's sanctum.

"How do you feel now?" Bunyan asked. "Since you've seen him, I mean."

"The same."

"The old man's determined, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to stay?"

"He threatened to cut me off if I didn't. Can he do that?"

"As his lawyer, I would have to advise you that he can."

"Maybe I should retain a lawyer of my own."

"You may, of course."

"Look . . . ethics and that noise aside, lay it on the line for me. Remember that I'm the one you'll have to deal with after Dad is out of the way, either in this office or in court."

"I'm well aware of that."

"We have a common interest. We each want to nail down some proceeds of the estate without making a lot of trouble for ourselves. How do we do that?"

Bunyan tapped the ashes off the end of his cigar and remained still, looking at the ash tray for a while. He slowly lifted his gaze to Jeff's.

"You stay in town until your father dies," he said. "Let him believe you're going to go along with everything the way he wants it. The minute his heart stops beating the hand is played. We can shuffle for a new deal."

"And that will be?"

"Any way you want it. The will, as it now stands, gives you everything. Later you can sell or you can give the damn business away. You can appoint a manager and vest all authority in him."

"So it just boils down to keeping the old man from changing the will."

"That's it."

"I was afraid maybe the will contained a provision cutting me off if I didn't remain here."

"It does."

"Well, then?"

"That won't hold water. I tried to tell your father, but he insisted anyway. He happens to think that once you get your feet wet, once you get started in the business, you won't want to give it up. He's a great believer in heredity. He thinks you've got the same stuff in you that he has."

"He's wrong."

"I'm inclined to agree. But one of old Jeff's main characteristics is stubbornness."

"Hear, hear."

"You're going to stay?"

"All right. Until he dies."

Bunyan moved a thick file folder in front of him, pulled a sheaf of papers out of it, and dropped them on the desk in front of Jeff. "Take these home. Go over them carefully. Be here at nine o'clock in the morning and I'll take you to the plant."

Bunyan squinted and added. "Or maybe you'd rather go with Shirley."

"I don't think so," Jeff said with a wry smile. Not this time."

"When you two came back from the hospital, she had a different skirt on."

"You have a keen eye," Jeff said.

"How was she?"

Jeff told him, "Careless. She spilled a bottle of Coke down her front. We drove to her house and I waited in the car while she went up and changed."

Bunyan laughed.

"Anything else?" Jeff asked pleasantly as he stood up.

"No. I'll see you at nine in the morning."

As he passed through the lawyer's outer office, he noted that Shirley was standing beside her desk, bent forward slightly as she scribbled something. He moved close and whispered at her ear, "Can't sit down?"

"Oh, it's like fire," she breathed.

"Sorry."

Her finger clamped on his arm. "Don't be. Please don't be."

When he reached the reception room, the older woman told him, "I have a message from Mrs, Bardell. She has registered at the Morning Glory Motel. That's just down the street."

Jeff thanked her and walked out.

The manager at the motel told him his wife had rented units 12 and 14 which were side by side. He and Sophia had 12 and the maid had the other one.

He went to 12 first, walked in and looked around. There was no one there. He went next door, rapped quickly, and walked in without waiting for an acknowledgment.

The sight that met his eyes would have shocked most husbands, but not Jeff. He grinned and dropped into a chair.

Lupita was shocked, however, by his sudden appearance. She let out a cry and attempted to get up, but she couldn't get her head out of the tent of pussy-flesh that Sophia had erected.

Sophia, being on top, looked Jeff's way and smiled. "We had to do something to relieve our boredom."

"Is that what you're relieving?" he asked, amused.

Lupita cried, "Meesus Bardell! Let me get up!"

"There, there, sweet," Sophia crooned, bending her head quickly. She resumed kissing the voluptuous brunette's slit.

Lupita twisted against the kiss for a few moments and then surrendered. But she turned her own head a little so she could look at Jeff instead of Sophia's bright pink gash.

He wiggled his fingers at her and said, "Hi."

"Meester Bardell, I'm sorry, I..."

"Shut up and make my wife happy," he told her.

Slowly she twisted her head back to position and Jeff saw her little red tongue flicking up at Sophia's clit.

Jeff got up and walked around the bed so as to examine the scene from all angles. It was interesting. He hadn't watched his wife sixty-nine with another woman in quite a while.

Finally he sat down near Lupita's feet. She was twisting again, her thighs weaving this way and that as Sophia's kisses grew hotter. Jeff concentrated on the darkness of Lupita's charms, the plumpness of her buttocks where they met her thighs, the fullness of the quivering thighs themselves.

His cock began to respond. He was a little slow in this respect because he had been expending himself rather freely during the last couple of days, but a man with any sex in him at all could hardly sit by for very long without saluting the wanton exposure and even more wanton activity that was taking place on the bed.

Jeff's cock saluted, and his trousers became uncomfortable for him.

Lupita was now in the throes of intense passionate agitation as Sophia's head bobbed in short motions, her sleek back arched like a bow. Lupita was kissing hungrily, too, but Jeff could not observe this without craning his neck out of shape, and he found more interest in gazing at the warm juncture of Lupita's thighs as her pelvis pumped against the stimulation she was receiving and her knees swayed this way and that.

Finally Lupita began convulsing under Sophia's intensification of the act, and the two women shuddered and clung together, thighs to head, hands to buttocks.

Sophia got off and Lupita sat up, her lipstick smeared, her eyes wider than usual. She stared at Jeff's smiling face a moment, then clawed at part of the bedclothes and pulled them around her, covering her face as well as her body.

Jeff laughed.

"Lupe, darling," Sophia scolded. "Don't be like that. Here. Get rid of the covers." Sophia tugged them away.

Lupita was blushing furiously.

Sophia stood beside the bed" and told her husband, "You screw her now."

Lupita released a little cry.

"She doesn't want me," Jeff said, twisting in his chair. The fact that he wanted her was painfully evident to him and would have been evident to both women if he had stood up.

"Nonsense," Sophia retorted. "Lupe, now behave yourself. Jeff watched you and me. It's only fair that I should have a chance to watch him and you."

"Yes, Lupe," Jeff added. "Fair's fair. You can see that."

"Meester Bardell!" she cried.

The poor girl was having difficulty adjusting herself to their sexual amorality and to the demands they were making of her. He felt a little sorry for her. But the only cure for her condition was deeper and more prolonged immersion in their way of life. This had worked with their last maid, a cute German named Helga. Unfortunately she had found herself a boy friend on the outside and had left the Bardells' service to get married. Jeff imagined that her new husband was a very happy young man since he was reaping the benefits of everything Jeff and Sophia had taught his wife.

Jeff stood up and began to strip.

Sophia, remaining naked, took a chair close to the bed. Lupita, still wide-eyed, stared at the gradual unveiling of Jeff's wiry form. She glanced several times at Sophia as if she couldn't comprehend how a wife could sit by and permit such a thing as this. But Lupita made no attempt to get off the bed. She wanted to keep her job which involved no work at all now that the

Bardells were away from home-and, more important yet, she did not want to be sent back to

Mexico. Jeff also suspected that he and his wife were in the process of winning her over. He took satisfaction in this. It had been his experience that even the most die-hard puritans (and Lupita was not one of these) could be won over to a life of so-called sinful pleasure without much strain on anyone's part, provided everything was confidential and assuming that the person's libido was not completely atrophied through lack of use.

Lupita's libido was a beauty.

Nude and fully erect, Jeff climbed onto the bed and adjusted the legs of the stunned Mexican girl.

He positioned himself between them, then backed up slightly so that his cock was slightly below her pussy, while his face was even with Lupe's high mounding tits.

He grasped one soft globe and directed the nipple to his lips. It was more red than brown now, and it was peg-like in form and rigidity. He caressed it with his lips, sliding them back and forth along its length.

Sophia watched interestedly as he shifted his kisses to the other large breast and surrounded the first one with his long, tapering fingers. He squeezed that as he toyed at the other. After a time he buried his face in her cleavage and rubbed the flesh against the bristling beard on his cheeks.

She grasped him about the head to pull him back to her still wet nipples.

He kissed even more passionately now and let his attentions range from her breasts down across her middle and onto her soft plump belly, just above the hairline. When he was entirely ready to proceed with the final phase and was convinced that Lupita was ready, too, he propelled himself forward with his hands against the bed at either side of her, and his steel-hard cock found its way into her slick tunnel without manual guidance from either of them.

He began to fuck her in long expert lunges that rubbed her clit exactly right and set off an immediate gyrating response from her. The innerspring mattress made a sound like a bellows and the bed frame creaked slightly. The springs worked soundlessly. The thought crossed Jeff's mind that in a motel perhaps the maids were instructed to oil them at regular intervals.

"Great, darling!" Sophia exclaimed. "I've never seen you practice better technique."

"Thanks," Jeff said between heavy breaths.

He speeded up with her, rocketing now. Sophia cried, "Wheel" followed by something else, but he paid no attention. Every bit of his interest was concentrated on the turgid missile of his own cock, and the warm, sleek pussy of Lupita.

H§ felt her legs come up and clamp around his back tightly. Her pelvis was fucking with feverish excitement, and then she was coming as he kept driving. His release followed hers, prompted by her frantically clutching cunt muscles grasping him and wringing him out with her orgasm.

Later, when he and Sophia were alone in their room, he asked, "Did you have much trouble persuading Lupita to play Lez with you?"

She resisted a little. But the poor girl's at our mercy. She has to do what we say." "Hell of a spot for a person to be in."

"I rather like it ... from my side. Say, her boobs are terrific, aren't they? Just don't spoil her for my sixty-nine sessions with her." "It didn't look as if I had, not the way she was eating you out when I got there." Then he.changed the subject and said, "I've got bad news, Sophia. We're going to have to hang in here for a while." "Oh, no..."

"Sorry. It can't be helped. If I don't, Dad will disinherit me. After he kicks off, I can put somebody else in charge of the company and get out."

"Just because you have to stay, that doesn't mean I do," Sophia suggested.

"Yes, it does. I want you here. And I don't see any reason why we should camp out in a motel when we can stay in the family mansion. Dad will be at the hospital."

"All right," Sophia sighed. "If that's the way it has to be."

"We'll move in the morning." He crossed and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Now let's shower and get dressed," he added. "It's almost time for dinner."

They showered together, which was a frequent exercise with them, but this time they merely washed one another. Both were pretty well sexed out.

Anyway, Jeff was thinking about the Bardell

Paper Company and the fact that he would have to go through the motions, at least, of taking charge of it. He had a lot of reading to do tonight, and tomorrow was destined to be a day that would test hismettle.