Among contemporary American paperback novelists, one of the most uniquely talented is Dale Flash. And, as has been pointed out by critics and scholars, the key to his talent lies in his ability to create a character, create a situation in which that character must face almost unimaginable odds to survive, emotionally, spiritually or sometimes physically, then, before the reader's eyes, allow the character to adapt, almost chameleon-like, perform to the very limits of rationality in a game that is never his or her own, and somehow finally succeed (on the level of Aristolian purgation) when success would have seemed beyond hope. That is, author Flash's characters function beyond their apparent limitations. They do things they should not be able to do. This adaptability is their ordeal, and it is their redemption. In his new novel Mr. Flash takes this technique to its own artistic limit. In this story of a couple of newly-weds who become prisoners in the Arizona desert of two desperate escaped convicts, The Kidnapped Bride tells one of the most shocking love stories to appear recently on the American literary scene. And that is the magic of the book: It is not a sordid story of rape but a tender story of love, freely given by a woman who has maintained her virginity until her wedding day (the day the story begins), to a man whom she should only fear and loath. And yet it is feasible, natural, unforced. And her submission to Lucky, the wanted mass murderer, serves as a psychological commentary to the nature of love itself, just as her rejection of her own husband (the day after their wedding) must serve as an ironic commentary on the institution of marriage itself when that institution is used not as it was intended but as an excuse for legalizing the sex act and the sex act alone.
It is with a sense of pride and destiny that we add The Kidnapped Bride to our list of distinguished contemporary fiction.
One
The highway was a straight flat ribbon running without a bend as though to the edge of the earth. The desert was a flat anvil, baked under the blistering sun. It was staid, endless and changeless, sand and cacti, sand and cacti ...
Daria Harper leaned back on the car seat, pulling her short mini-skirt almost up to the leg bands of her panties and relishing the feel of the air conditioning between her slightly perspiring thighs. Her long hair hanging loose and free over shapely sloping shoulders partially exposed by the sleeveless sweater she wore, the sensuous young bride looked affectionately over at her husband John, whose eyes were intent on the road. Then she sighed and removed the map from the dash and folded it open.
"Needles, Flagstaff, Yuma, Tombstone ... " she said winsomely.
"Huh?" John asked, shifting his gaze from the road to Daria, his gaze descending briefly down to the shapely swells of her breasts clearly outlined in her tight-fitting sweater.
"The names of the towns here in Arizona," she said. "There's something so magic sounding about it." Then, suddenly unable to contain herself, the sensuous twenty-one-year old blonde leaned suddenly over to kiss her young husband on the side of the face, her breasts brushing teasingly against his arm. "Oh John, I'm so excited to finally be moving. On the road, I mean. But not just that. I feel like finally, after all this waiting, we're finally on the road of our lives-together. Now ... I can hardly even understand why we waited so long."
"Waiting was your idea," John said with a smile.
Daria slid back over in the seat and leaned against the door. "I know," she said demurely. "I wonder if it wasn't a mistake."
The young husband reached over and lay his hand softly on his wife's bare thigh several inches up from the knee. "I don't think so, now."
"What?"
"I'm not sorry we waited. Now we still have the fun of discovery ahead of us, I mean, the rest of the discovery. It's old fashioned as hell, like I said, but now that the waiting is over, it doesn't seem that bad." He paused for a moment, moistening his lips. "You liked it, didn't you honey?"
Daria looked at him sharply. "What?"
"I said, you did like it, didn't you? Making love?"
"Of ... course I liked it," Daria said, swallowing hard as the words seemed almost to catch in her throat. Then she forced a smile over her face and lay her hand on John's, still resting on her slender bare thigh. "Of course, oh my God, I loved it."
"Good. There was just a time ... there at the end ... when I thought ... when I thought you were let-down."
"Oh John. It was wonderful. I was just a little sore."
"And it'll get better. With two people, any two people, the first time it's, you know, a bit awkward. And for a virgin."
He let his voice trail off. He glanced briefly back at Daria's now pensive face, then returned his eyes to the road. After a moment he removed his hand from her leg and placed it back on the steering-wheel.
Daria turned her gaze again to the arid landscape. Far off on the horizon she could see a strange looking cloud, almost red, lying close to the earth. She stared at it for a moment, then forgot it as her thoughts began to drift. She supposed it was ridiculously old fashioned for two lovers in this day and age to wait until they were married before having sex. That had been John's persisting argument during the whole six months of their engagement. But being the stubborn girl she was, Daria had held out against all temptation. Then yesterday they had been married in a small civil ceremony in Los Angeles. They'd bid farewell to their parents, taken John's second-hand Chevrolet and set out on their honeymoon, a cross country tour that would end in New York City. They had stopped the night in a Holiday Inn.
Even now flutters of nervous excitement coursed through Daria's body as she remembered. And even if taking the vows did place a stamp of moral approval on her defloration, it had done nothing to change the natural fear of penetration which had always plagued the chaste young blonde, and Daria had been literally gripped by fear as they'd ridden the elevator up to their room. Both of them had drunk quite a lot of wine with dinner and she recalled noting a kind of glazed look in John's eyes as his gaze coursed hungrily over her ripe young body. Then the elevator had stopped and they'd walked in tense silence down the hall to their room. John lifted her and carried her over the threshold. Holding her strongly in his arms, he had kissed her on the lips before letting her gently down to the floor. He stood looking at her in silence for a moment, then excused himself to go to the restroom. From the doorway he said, very softly, a request rather than a command, "Take off your dress, honey. And get into bed."
Daria's heart was pounding rapidly and her breathing was hoarse and strained. She and John had on several occasions come fearfully close to going all the way, and her frustration when she'd finally stopped him had been almost unbearable. But now tonight there would be no stopping him, and if there'd been any doubt in her mind that the moment of truth had finally arrived that doubt was completely erased by the assurance with which he'd told her to get into bed.
Daria listened to her newly married husband brushing his teeth in the bathroom. She watched herself in the three-quarter length dresser mirror, her eyes narrowing slightly as she reached up and started to unbutton her blouse. She parted the garment slowly off the full upstanding mounds of her breasts pushed up high and tightly together by her tight-fitting brassiere, shed it off her shoulders and lay it across the back of the chair. Then she reached behind her back and with a deft flick of her finger loosened the snap to the bar. She shrugged her shoulders slightly to work the straps down off her arms, her nipples swelling to tingling rigidity from their contact with the air. She loosened her skirt, giving a little wriggle of her hips to drop it down off the flare of her pelvis and her long slender thighs. It fell to the floor at her ankles and she stepped out of it, naked except for her low-hanging near-transparent panties.
Daria's face was flushed with her building excitement as she observed her sensuously exposed body in the mirror. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on her slender shapely frame. Her skin was golden tanned, her legs long and tapered, her waist narrow and her buttocks flaring and tight. And even through the transparency of her panties she could just distinguish the sparse and silken triangle of light blonde pubic hair nestled so invitingly between her thighs.
Daria was acutely conscious of her own sexuality as she let her eyes fix on the forbidden blonde triangle of hair. Then she jerked her gaze suddenly away from the mirror as the bathroom door opened and John emerged, his eyes widening slightly at the sight of her almost naked young body.
"Jesus, baby," he said in a gusty voice. "You have got to be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."
Daria did not know when she'd ever felt so completely naked and vulnerable, and she waited trembling as John walked slowly toward her, almost stalking her like an animal stalking its prey. His expression reflected almost a worship; and something about it gave her a funny feeling. But she couldn't deny the little wisps of excitement shuddering through her own naked nipple-peaked breasts and panty covered loins at the way he was looking for her.
Then suddenly he was on her, gathering her into his arms and pulling her nakedness strongly to his chest, his lips covering over hers and his tongue snaking deep into her mouth.
He kissed her for a long time, crushing her breasts against his muscular chest, dropping his hands down to the silk covered half-moons of her ass to pull her hardly protected pubic mound warmly up against the bulging rigidity of his already fully erected cock looming up in his trousers. Then he dropped his face lower, nibbling down over the sensitive skin of her neck, his hands digging into the firm pliant flesh of her ass cheeks from the outside of her panties. He held her for a moment longer, then released her and urged her gently back toward the bed.
Daria's legs were limp with excitement and fear as she dropped down on her back on the bed. Then, mesmerized by her dread and anticipation, she watched John unbutton his shirt and push it off his broad muscular shoulders, then in a quick motion undo his trousers and jerk both them and his jockey shorts quickly down, the sight of his thick purplish pulsating cock almost taking her breath away.
God, it was bigger than she'd ever imagined, much better than it had felt the times she'd touched it with her hand on the outside of his trousers, and she was suddenly gripped by a genuine fear at the thought of actually having to take it up inside her tight little vagina.
Then, as she was trying simply to come to terms with the concept of what was about to happen to her, John kicked off his shoes, stepped quickly out of his trousers and was suddenly up onto the bed beside her, kneeling over her, his gaze roving hungrily over the naked curves of her prone surrendered form.
A little shiver darted down Daria's spine as John reached out to cup his hands over the two naked swells of her breasts, the contacts of his palms on her nipples causing the sensitive little buds to swell to even greater tingling rigidity. He dropped over her, his face snuggling against the softness of her gently sloping shoulders, his tongue flicking out to lick maddeningly over the upper portion of one of her generously rounded breasts before his lips sought out her erect little nipple and covered right over the pulsating tingling bud.
"Ooouuu," Daria moaned in spite of all her lingering trepidation. John's hands were mauling over her body like he was some kind of sex-starved animal, his lips sucking hungrily at the little desire-swollen bud of her nipple, his fingernails clawing at her goose-bumped flesh. He raked down over the ribs and her smooth flat belly, down across the tiny hole of her navel and into the first thin silken curls of pubic hair sticking out over the waistband of her flimsy little panties. Then she shivered as his hand shipped down into the top of the low-hanging little garment, his fingers brushing down through the sparse blonde hair of her cunt and venturing suddenly between her slightly parted thighs to trail right along the already lewdly moistened lips of her cunt.
"Oh please," Daria whimpered, torn between the warm stirrings of excitement and her continued fear of the unknown. For a moment she suspended consciousness of the fact that she and John had been married that afternoon, that this was not mere play, but foreplay, leading to the inevitable frightening penetration to come. Then she was snapped rudely back to reality as he dropped down even more heavily on her prone and pinioned body and suddenly she felt the hot throbbing shaft of his penis prod straight up between her legs.
A low moan spewed from the naked blonde's lips and she ground her buttocks down into the bed in retreat, flailing her head from side to side, her eyes opening wide as her young husband levered further up over her squirming body. At the same time he used his finger to part the flanged hair-lined lips of her cunt, working it slowly up into the cringing little opening as she jerked and struggled beneath him.
Now in spite of all her natural fear Daria's whole body was crying out with inflamed and surging need, and she closed her eyes as he again fixed his lips over one of the tingling nipples of her breasts to resume a hungry sucking pressure on the sensitive little bud. His hands slipped from her cunt, his thumb stroking with maddening effect at the pulsating little nub of her clitoris. She felt him shift slightly above her, then stiffened as he seized the fully erected hardness of his cock and guided it straight up between her thighs to press right against the quivering entrance of her completely moistened vagina. As she started to reach down to try to defend herself he seized her by the wrist, pinioning her arms tight above her head. Then, holding her helplessly beneath him, he gave a low growl and lunged to ram the hard swollen head of his cock right up into the elastic-like little entrance of her lust-heated pussy orifice.
"Oh, God?" Daria cried out from the raw searing sensation. The sudden sharp stab of pain almost took her breath away and she felt like she was about to be penetrated by a red-hot shaft of steal. But there was no relief or escape and as she writhed and moaned like a bound prisoner on the rack the searing penetration continued, the thick cudgel of hard male flesh shoving gradually deeper and deeper up into the cringing little pussy sheath, sweeping into her cunt with a surging vicious fury to tear her hymen like a tissue as it sank to the hilt into her previously unviolated vagina.
"Ooooooooooohhh!" the writhing blonde moaned, her whole body racked by the agonizing entry. His massive cock was buried into her to the hilt and for a moment he lay completely still upon her. Then she tensed, giving out with another tortured gasp as he flexed his penis to throb it even deeper, and a moment later he began to move.
Daria lay almost motionless in her pain and fear, her body trembling as John slowly withdrew and skewered carefully inward again, the bludgeoning member pushing apart the enveloping inner walls of flesh until she felt completely opened and lacerated. But at least the second pistoning entry had not been as painful as the first, and already she was beginning to realize that her terrible fear of the act of sex had been without real foundation. It did hurt, but she knew she had born the worst of the pain, and as her husband continued to skewer slowly in and out of her burning loins, the pain seemed to further subside. Her vaginal muscles stretched and adjusted, her lubricating fluids mingling with the blood of her torn hymen to further slicken and moisten the forced and stabbing invasion.
Then, as John's hunching movements above her gradually increased in rhythm and intensity, Daria found her body seeming to respond with an instinct of its own. Almost without realizing what she was doing, she began to slowly undulate her buttocks beneath him, slithering her cunt warmly up and down on the still ruthlessly violating shaft of flesh ramming out between her forcibly splayed thighs. Suddenly, experiencing a complete rejuvenation of the lust that had gripped her before, she threw her hands up around his back, hugged her breasts warmly against his chest and kissed him hungrily on the lips as she began to grind her naked ass-cheeks in luxuriating circles up from the bed to further intense the mingled pain and pleasure sensations she derived from the continued burning penetration of her loins.
"Oh my god, oh yes!" she cried out in final lust-inspired surrender. "Oh yes, it's good! I love it yes, do it to me!"
It seemed to Daria at first that that must have been exactly what John had been waiting to hear. She just had time to see the sudden wild look in his eyes. She heard a low animal sounding groan from his lips. Then suddenly he was racking her body with a series of shattering staccato lunges, pistoning the lacerating hardness of his cock rapidly in and out of the still sensitively cringing opening of her cunt. Then as the surging liquid of his cum suddenly came spewing forth from the head of his cock, washing and mingling with her own vaginal juices as drop after teeming droplet flooded into the warm inner tightness of her cunt, she realized that John was already reaching his climax. Her words of surrender must have excited him beyond control, and he continued to hammer up and down over her squirming body, ramming again and again deep into her spasming, eagerly clutching pussy, racking her with the fury of his assault until the last drop of his hot male jism squirted deep up into her loins and he sagged down tiredly on top of her, panting in exhaustion as she continued to buck and thrash beneath him.
"ooooohhhhhhhh!" Daria moaned in despair as she realized her defloration was ending just when she'd really been starting to enjoy it. Miraculously the terrible pain she'd experienced before had completely ended. Her whole body was on fire with seemingly insatiable lust, and she thought she could have died as she felt the filling shaft of John's cock begin almost immediately to inflate. Then he kissed her, briefly and tenderly on the lips. Then he withdrew and rolled off and lay, panting to catch his breath, on his back on the bed beside her.
Two
Daria could almost feel the terrible frustration that had gripped her, and for a moment she wasn't even aware of the slowing down of the car. Then she heard John mutter a soft curse under his breath and she looked sharply around.
"What's the matter? Why are you stopping here."
In the instant before he answered her eyes took in the seeming endless expanse of the unchanged plain around them, the cacti standing like silent thorned sentinels, that red cloud she now recognized as a moving wall of wind-swept sand looming much nearer than before.
"It's heating up."
They rolled to a halt on the shoulder of the road. A truck roared by, blaring its horn.
"Damn. I should of flagged him. I didn't realize he was behind us."
"What's the matter?" Daria said again.
"The engine's heating up."
She looked at the thermometer just before he cut the ignition and saw that the needle showed 220 degrees. She felt hot outside air as he opened the door, and smelled the strange dry-dusty odor it bore, somewhat as air will bear the odor of rain from a distant, approaching storm cloud. Then he stepped out and closed the door and moved to the front of the car to open the hood. After a moment Daria got out. She cast an apprehensive glance at the looming dust storm, then also walked to the front of the car, where a cloud of steam rose from the heated engine.
"Radiator's leaking," John said. "She's empty now. If we drive any further it'll burn up the motor."
"There's a dust storm coming," Daria said.
"I know." He stepped away from the car and peered back down the highway in the direction from which they'd come. "Not a car on the road. I should've flagged that truck." He turned and looked the other way. "Must be twenty miles to a town. But ... is that a house up there?"
Daria squinted, following his gaze. "Where?"
"The right of the road, way up there."
After a moment she distinguished the brown dot. "It's a building."
"Then we'd better get going. There's bound to be water there."
"The dust storm ... ?" Daria said, looking again toward the approaching cloud.
"Yeh, I see it. We'll have to hurry. Don't wanna get caught out here in that."
John opened the door of the car and removed the keys from the ignition. He took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the dash, lit one and started to lock the door.
"Just a minute," Daria said. "Let me change into my sandals. These are hard to walk in."
"Well hurry, then," John said with slight impatience.
Daria changed into her sandals and they set out along the road, walking hurriedly before the threat of the coming sandstorm. Occasionally John would turn to peer back the other way in the hope of seeing a car. But there was nothing. It was as though they were completely alone in the world.
The walk took much longer than they would have suspected. The distance had been deceiving. Finally the house began to take shape, a rambling adobe structure, Spanish style with a red tejado tile roof.
"Jesus," said John. "I wonder who would build a house out here."
Exhausted and feeling as though she would die of thirst, Daria trudged on beside him, casting another quick look at the dust cloud, now so close she thought she could almost have reached out and touched it. By the time they reached the gate to the rock fence that surrounded the house she could feel the hot gusting wind and the first grains of sand, stinging like pellets from an air rifle as they pelted her tender skin.
"It looks deserted," she said.
"Yeah. We'll have to break in."
They ran to the front porch. John pounded hard on the door, put his ear to it to listen to a sound from within, tried the handle and found it locked. He tested it with his shoulder, then took Daria's hand and led her back down the steps and around toward the side.
"We'll try the back, or go through one of the windows."
The back door was also securely locked, but the shutters were open on one of the windows there. John left Daria standing against the wall for protection from the thickening sand, went to the fence and retrieved a couple of stones. He came back, hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and tossed one of them through the glass.
"I guess they'll understand, whoever's place this is," he said as he used the other stone to break away the glass that remained in the lower half of the window frame. "I'll let you in the backdoor," he said before he scrambled up over the window ledge and dropped to the floor, passing out of Daria's sight behind the curtain that still covered it.
Now the storm had really arrived and Daria inched her way along the wall to the back door, and waited. And waited ...
And waited ...
"John! Open up, John!" She raised her fist and pounded hard, the sound of the knocking almost obscured to her ears by the sound of the rushing wind. "John! Let me in!"
She tried the handle again. She shoved against the door with her shoulder. She drew back and lunged harder but it opened before she made contact with the wood; she went stumbling through into a small corridor, sprawling head-long onto the floor, her skirt flying up from her thighs almost to the legbands of her lacy white panties. She groaned, rolled on her side and laboriously levered herself up on her elbow. Then a sudden low cry rose to her lips:
"John!"
Standing over her was a man she'd never seen in her life, shirtless and hairy-chested, forty-ish and stocky though his muscular frame bore little excess fat. His features were coarse, his face and balding head deeply burned by the sun. His blue eyes reflected a kind of innocence, Daria thought, or even stupidity; somehow they reminded her of the eyes of a friendly dog. But in spite of his benign appearance something about the way he was looking at her almost made her skin crawl. He was looking at her with an almost eerie fascination, his eyes roving slowly over her long slender, now almost completely exposed thighs, up over the tightly rounded cheeks of her ass and her narrow waist and torso, the straining high-set swells of her breasts stretching out in her tight-fitting sweater, her lovely, sultry, now shocked and frightened face framed in the long, loose flowing blonde of her hair.
Daria didn't think she'd ever been examined by a man the way this man was examining her now. He was looking at her as if she were the first woman he'd ever seen in his life.
"Who ... are you?"
"My name's Hank."
Daria tugged her skirt down over her smooth golden-tanned thighs. She scooted back a pace on the floor as the man stepped toward her. Then he reached down suddenly and took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She cringed away from him, still trembling with fear, almost feeling his eyes burn into the sensuous flesh of her breasts right through her sweater and tightly constricting brassiere.
"Where's ... where's my husband."
He said nothing for a moment. He was just looking at her, at her face, her breasts, her thighs and her lower belly where the miniskirt lay lightly between them, giving just a hint of her little forbidden pubic triangle. He seemed to hear the question only belatedly, as if something else had snapped him out of a trance and he heard not the question itself by a vague and distant echo.
"He's your husband." It was a dead kind of statement on his lips. His face wrinkled into a thoughtful frown. He regarded her silently for a moment and said: "He had an accident."
"John?" Daria's free hand flew up to cover her mouth.
"If that's his name," Hank said, turning away suddenly and almost pulling her off her feet as he started down the hall.
He opened a door and they stepped into a cozy den with a masculine decor and old antique-looking wooden furniture. He released her wrist and Daria, stared aghast at John, sitting on a couch with his head bowed, blood dripping from his nose, a defeated, shamed look in his eyes.
Sitting across the room in an easy chair was another shirtless muscular man, young, tall and broad shouldered with a handsome sunburned face, steel gray eyes, hair blond-bleached by the sun. He was panting to catch his breath, staring across at John. It was only an instant after Daria and the other man entered the room that he looked up at her. In his eyes roving over the supple curves of her body there was a kind of dazed awareness. She felt almost naked standing before him. She was stunned by his kind of country-cowboy good looks. For a reason she couldn't quite understand she was excited by the way he looked at her, and she felt at the same time deeply ashamed, somehow dirty; her body was an object of self-revulsion. Outside the window she could see the sand whirling by. The heat was almost stifling, incongruous with the sound of the storm. She looked at John's bleeding nose again. She looked at the man's hand, where there was a fresh abrasion over the knuckles. A shiver went through her as her eyes met his. Then suddenly she was stumbling forward toward him.
"What have you done?" she hissed.
He was standing up slowly, she still stumbling toward him.
"You bastard!" It was a screech.
She was upon him, flailing his face with her open hand.
"Goddamn, woman!"
Her hand struck his face again. He seized her wrists, pulling them down, pushing them behind her back, crossing them just above her buttocks, the pressure causing her to lean forward, her breast brushing against his bare, perspiring chest. She smelled the strong male odor of his body, she was acutely aware of his nearness and strength. She kicked at his shins. It was almost ineffective because she was wearing only sandals.
"Let me go!" she cried. "John!"
She looked back over her head. John sat where he was, staring at her almost dully. She looked back at the tall brutishly handsome man, holding her effortlessly in his arms, pressing her trembling body against his own so that she could feel the stirring pressure of the growing bulge in the crotch of his trousers, pushed right up against her own soft inner thighs.
"Let me go!"
"So you can knock hell out of me again?"
"You hit my husband."
"Yeah, but I didn't mean to hurt him." He smiled. "How'd I know he wasn't a burglar?"
Then he kissed her suddenly and hard on the lips. Daria was so surprised she didn't even have time to close her mouth in defense. His tongue snaked hungrily between her teeth. He ground his bulging trousers-clad cock against her loins. He was breathing his hot breath deep into her mouth, holding her limp body strong against his own.
For an instant Daria's legs seemed on the verge of buckling beneath her. She felt as if the room was spinning around her. She melted in the strong young man's muscled arms, against his thinly haired chest. She took his tongue greedily in, almost to her throat. It was just a slip, a slackening, a reflex done without thought or intent. Then she realized what was happening and she almost screamed with shame as she snapped back awake, jerking her head away, kicking and struggling with all her might, almost falling as the strong hands gripping her wrists turned loose.
She stepped back. The man was looking at her with a cold hard gaze. There was just the slightest hint of a curl to one side of his lip. She swung again to slap him. He caught her wrist, held it until she ceased to struggle, then released it. Daria's arm fell to her side. Breathless, she took another step back and looked around at John, still sitting where he'd been on the couch, his expression unchanged.
"John!" she gasped, her voice almost cracking. "John, who are these men."
"It's obvious," John said almost tiredly. "See the white trousers? They're convicts from the state work-farm up north. Probably on their way to Mexico when they got caught in the storm."
Three
"Call me Lucky," said the younger of the two escaped convicts. "That's what they used to call me before I got sent up."
He sat at the kitchen table, inspecting the broken-down double-barrel shotgun he'd found in one of the bedroom closets. On the table before him lay a box of shells and a .22 caliber pistol he'd also found in the closet. John sat mute and gloomy across the table from him. Hank, the older con, stood looking out the window at raging storm. Daria was making sandwiches with reasonably fresh bread from the refrigerator and some deviled ham she'd found in the cupboard.
"Dunno whose place this is," Luke said. "But he sure didn't take much care of his guns. Figured it was your place till you didn't come through the front door. Sounded just like a cop when Buster here started knocking out that glass, the way they'll knock 'em out with the butt of their gun. That's the only reason I socked him. Hell, I didn't mean to bloody his nose."
"W-what are you going to do with us?" Daria asked, turning to face the handsome shirtless man. He looked up at her thoughtfully. He joined the shotgun back together, shoved two shells in the barrel and slammed it closed with a click. His eyes were roving intently over the soft supple curves of her body. The question echoed in her mind. There was in it a recognition, an admission: they were under his power; it was his decision as to what would be their fate. It was terrifying and yet it was exciting. There was a powerful, almost staggering symbolism in the words, to do with-it made them objects. And she knew he could do anything to them, or with them, that he wanted. He could take them as hostages. He could kill them. He could rape her ...
"I dunno," he said thoughtfully, still looking at her in a way that almost made her tremble.
"Are you going to ... keep us here?" she ventured with a quivering voice.
"Well it's a cinch we ain't gonna let you leave before we do. But nobody's going anywhere till that storm's past."
"And ... how long will that be?"
"Hank?" Lucky asked, looking up at the man at the window.
Hank turned. "I seen 'em blow for two days. All depends."
"See? There ain't no way of knowin'." He turned and looked at John, sulking across the table. "What's wrong with your car."
"Radiator's leaking. Left it a few miles back up the road."
"Hell. Least you could've done is limped it on to the house. Car on the road's gonna attract attention out here. We can fix that radiator, least enough to get us to the border. Ain't that right Hank?"
"Hell I guess it is. I've fixed a radiator with a piece of chewing gum and gotten further'n that."
"You think you're going to take our car to the border?"
That was John. Daria turned suddenly to look at him. It was the first word of objection, to anything, she'd heard from his lips since they'd walked into this horrible situation. But it was a protest without force, like the complaining of a child. She looked at Lucky, the studious way he was regarding her husband.
"You think you can just take it, just like that?"
"I dunno who's gonna stop us," Lucky said without malice or contempt. "Hell, it ain't nothin' personal. We're just in sort of a fix here." He stuck the pistol in his back pocket, propped the shotgun against the table, walked over to look out the window at the storm. Then he came back and retrieved the shotgun and walked out the door. After a moment Hank went out after him.
Daria spread the last of the deviled ham onto the last slice of bread, turned and put the platter onto the table. She stood staring silently down at her sulking husband, then spoke to break the silence:
"What are we going to do, honey?"
He looked up, his eyes flashing. "Do? What can we do? They're armed, and desperate." He paused, staring at her body, then added: "You let him kiss you."
"Let him kiss me?" she hissed, her face reddening with anger. "I was fighting him."
"Yeah. Don't give me that. I saw. I was watching, remember."
The anger went through her like a white blinding wave, and left her trembling, face flushed, a crazy glint in her eyes. "I know you were watching. You were just watching."
She slammed the platter down and turned and stalked out of the room after the two men, the two real men, she was thinking to herself. And yet she knew deep down inside that what disturbed her most was that there was a grain of truth in what her husband had said. She couldn't understand it herself. She didn't know what had happened to her. But she had let him kiss her. And just for that instant when she'd forgotten herself, she had enjoyed it.
* * *
The house was best defined as ranch-style. There was the den, a spacious and luxuriously furnished living room, three bedrooms, the kitchen, a very modern bath. It was adjoined by a garage, now devoid of an automobile, though Hank reported there were an ample supply of tools and that he was sure he would have no trouble getting John's Chevy running again once the storm had passed and someone could go out and retrieve it. The decor of the place was in general very masculine. The name that appeared on the small amount of correspondence, most bank statements and other business mail Lucky found was addressed to Major Harvey Edgels, U.S.M.C. (retired).
"Guy must just like nice houses and like the desert," the blond-headed convict said.
They were seated in the den, Lucky in the easy chair, Daria perched with her legs crossed on the couch. John, as far as she knew, was still in the kitchen. Hank, having noticed air vents in the wall, had suspected the house was centrally air conditioned and had gone in search the thermostat controls. He said he hadn't been in an air conditioned room in just over seven years. Daria didn't miss the implication, and the very thought of it sent chills down her spine.
Lucky had discovered the den was equipped with a well-supplied liquor cabinet and had poured himself a whisky. He'd offered Daria something and she had politely refused. Now she almost regretted it. Her nerves were badly frayed, and sitting here in this tense silence with that black storm raging outside, across from her this almost dashingly handsome brute of a man who had been incarcerated for no telling how long for no telling what heinous crimes, was almost more than she could bear.
Lucky lifted his glass and downed it. He stood up and walked to the liquor cabinet, took the bottle of whisky and poured another, regarding the alcohol as if it were liquid gold. Daria sat still cross-legged, her skirt smoothed down over her sensuously contoured thighs, her breasts rising and falling slightly with her low, strained breathing. Sensing his attention was directed elsewhere, she allowed herself to place him under a moment's careful scrutiny, her eyes moving slowly over his bronze-tanned arms and broad muscular back, flat stomach and thinly haired chest. In her mind she made a quick comparison between his hard-labor conditioned body and John's more flaccid physique. She felt a twinge of shame as she realized the implication of that thought. Then Lucky suddenly looked up at her and she jerked her eyes quickly away from him, flushing slightly with embarrassment. She squirmed nervously on the couch, uncrossed her legs and crossed them again. When she looked back he was still staring, and again she experienced an unwanted shivering flutter down in her belly and loins as she remembered the way he'd held her in his arms to subdue her after she'd attacked him in her feminine feline rage.
"You better go out and see about your old man," he said, his gray eyes smoldering as he observed her soft supple curves.
"He's ... he's all right. He's just a little upset," she said in a faltering voice.
"Yeah. He'll get over it, long as he doesn't try somethin' stupid."
Daria stood, acutely conscious of his eyes on her body. She took a couple of steps toward the hall door, then paused and looked back at him again. He sipped his whisky, observing her with a ruthless animal gaze. For the briefest instant her eyes strayed to the shotgun leaned against the chair where he'd sat. She realized that now she was actually closer to it than he was. But she knew she would never have had the courage to use it, even if she could have gotten to it first, even if she had known how to fire it.
Then she looked back at him. "What are you going to do with us?"
"Well ... " He moistened his lips. "I 'magine you know what I'd like to do to you about now."
Daria cast her eyes quickly away toward the floor, the obvious meaning of what he'd said causing a shiver to run maddeningly up her spine. "I didn't mean it that way," she stammered after a slight pause.
"Uh-huh. Doubt if you got much idea what it's like to live couped-up with a bunch of men." When she looked up again he had the tall glass turned up to his mouth. He emptied it, lowered it, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "I ain't gonna kill you, I don't think. So git on outta ..."
His voice trailed off. He was looking at the door. She turned to look. Standing in it was John, the same wounded look on his face.
"Am I interrupting something?" he asked after a tense moment's silence.
"Naw." Lucky sighed, poured another drink and walked back to the chair. "You all right, Buster?"
"Sure," John said. "I'm feeling just fucking great." He turned his eyes suddenly toward Daria, glaring at her bitterly. Then he looked back at the escaped convict. "Our honeymoon, you know. We were gonna drive cross country: New Orleans, Memphis, Washington, D.C ... end up in New York." He paused and looked at the darkened window. Night was falling but it was hardly perceptible on the already darkened sky of the storm. "That sand's going to ruin the paint job. I bet it looks like the craters on the moon before it's through with it." He laughed, pitifully. "But you're going to steal it anyway."
"Yeah. You got insurance, theft insurance?"
"Yes."
"Then what the hell are you complaining about? Have a drink and get your mind off your troubles." John walked to the liquor cabinet, removed a bottle of gin and half filled a glass. He walked to the couch and sat down, drinking moodily. Daria stood where she was, staring silently down at her husband, wondering what it was that had happened that had made her feelings change so abruptly and so drastically, wondering if this, the way she thought she felt now, had felt the last two hours, was real, or if the other, the way she'd thought she felt for the whole year they'd been going out together and the one brief moment of loving bliss she'd enjoyed before he'd suddenly lost control and cum in her and her defloration had abruptly ended, was real. She walked to the window, slowly, moving her body sensuously, acutely aware of the beating of her heart, of the awakened feminine animal that had lived dormant in her so long, acutely aware of the ruthless brute of a man who sat shirtless and staring at her from across the room. She turned, sucking her breath in to cause a perceptible straining of the firmly rounded swells of her breasts. Then she started as Lucky added: "And you go sit down with Buster. You're making me nervous, prancing around there like some Tucson hooker."
Daria somehow stifled the gasp that rose in her throat. As though it was a sound from far away, she heard John's quick burst of laughter. She felt her face redden again. The convict was staring at her now almost without the slightest spark of emotion in his steel gray eyes. For a moment she couldn't even find the voice to speak, and when at last she did the words came out slurred, meaningless sounding and crazy: "If you think ... you filthy lecherous ... if you believe that just because you've got that ... that shotgun ... if you think you can talk to me like that ... well I want you to know ... I want you to ... "
"Shut up, honey." It was John, his voice dry and gloomy, on the couch behind her. She turned, her eyes filling with tears, to glare at him. "He's right. Pour yourself a drink and sit down and relax."
"Oh ... you!"
She rushed suddenly across the room to the door and out. She stumbled, blinded by her hurt and rage, back down the hall to the kitchen. Seeing the tray of sandwiches she'd made she noticed that at least someone had had a couple of them. She took one herself, bit into it, chewed slowly and swallowed. She dropped the rest of it onto the tray. She turned to the refrigerator, jerked the door open and removed a tray of ice and ran it under the hot water in the sink. Then she emptied it into a bowl, took it and started stiffly back out and down the hall to the den.
"Didn't mean nothin' personal when I popped you this afternoon ... Jus' want you to know that. We don't mean nobody any harm ... . "
That was Lucky, talking to John sitting silent on the couch. The convict also fell silent as Daria entered the room. Her eyes still reddened, she walked stiffly across toward the liquor cabinet, staring straight ahead, looking at neither of them. She put the bowl on the cabinet. She dropped several cubes of ice into a glass and poured a generous drink of gin over the ice. She took a deep breath, lifted it to her lips and drank almost half of it down in a gulp. She paused, gasping and grimacing from the bitter after-taste, then drank again, emptying it, filled it and drank again, the warming effect of the alcohol running pleasantly through her body as the blurring wave of lightening inebriation passed evenly through her brain. Then she sighed, conscious for the first time of the coolness of the air conditioning, which seemed to have crept slowly over the room. Then, hearing footsteps in the door, she turned to see Hank come through.
He paused, he looked at the two men, then at her. She thought she detected sympathy, or even a kind of empathy, in his simple, dog-like eyes.
"There's a attic overhead," he said, looking up. "Trap door out back leads to it. Then, up there, those vents, if you open them, gives you a straight shot into the house."
Lucky nodded. "We can hole up there if anybody comes snooping around."
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. See, they are here now."
"Hunh?" Lucky rose suddenly to his feet.
"Couple of state-troopers just pulled up outside."
The silence that seemed to freeze the little gathering like rigid salt statues must have lasted only a few seconds. And yet during those seconds, as Daria stood motionless too just letting her eyes move from one face to the next, she thought the whole lines of conflict, the whole eerie still undrawn and unacknowledged emotional tangle in which they all found themselves embroiled became clear. She saw that mixed gleam of hope and fear in her husband's eyes. She saw Lucky's steel-gray eyes grow hot as though with a myriad of conflicting forces: anger, maybe fear, determination and lust, and when he looked at her that gleaming flicker of carnal awareness she'd observed with such impact before. And now, she thought, he was thinking that he could have done it, could have had her, and now it might be too late.
And she was thinking it too, her heart pounding-she didn't know how she felt.
Four
Then he was moving, Lucky, the silence was broken, gone. "You do the talking," he said to John, and Daria couldn't help wonder if he'd picked John to face their adversaries because he thought she would be more likely to betray them, or for some other reason entirely ... "You're upstairs with us," he said, pointing at Daria. Then he had the shotgun in his hand, pitched it to Hank, and said: "Take her on up. Get on that vent in the hall where you can see the door.
"Me do the talking?" John said, looking slightly stunned.
"Yeah. If there's talking to be done." He took out the pistol and waved it in his face. "This is for the girl if you say something wrong. He paused and added: "But before that the shotgun's for you and the heat."
John swallowed, his face blanched. "But ... what do I say?"
"Well now it depends on what they ask, doesn't it?" said Lucky. "This place belongs to a Major ... English. You're an old friend. The ... the car's yours if they ask about that. No mention of us, I mean no goddamn mention of any escaped cons, unless they ask. You got that."
He nodded. "Yes." He looked ruefully at Daria. Hank had her arm and was leading her away but she was moving slowly, holding back, for reasons she still didn't quite know. She saw again the bitterness in John's eyes; they seemed to take in her whole body, as if he hated all of her. Then the doorbell rang and he turned suddenly away.
"Hold it." Lucky nudged him with the gun. "Wait till we're up there."
Then he moved swiftly, his hand just brushing the small of her back as he guided her out of the door ahead of Hank and down the hall toward the back of the house. Now she went without resistance. The trapdoor in the ceiling of the little back closet was open; a ladder stood beneath it against the wall. She went up it first, conscious of Hank's eyes widening slightly as he glimpsed up beneath her skirt from below. She ascended, breathless, up into a dark, low ceilinged attic. Hank came up behind her, then Lucky. Downstairs the doorbell rang again, followed by a loud knocking. They went, stooped beneath the tile roof of the house, back toward the front. Through a vent she glimpsed the living room. They passed it and went on.
"There," Hank whispered.
Ahead she saw the light of another vent. They reached it and she felt a hand on her shoulder, turned to Lucky and in the darkness saw him motioning for her to lie down. She lay down, peering through the vent down into the hall-foyer at the front entrance to the house. Hank knelt on one side of her. Lucky signaled and he put the pistol, which he'd apparently exchanged the shotgun for, against the side of her head. She shuddered, sucking her breath in deeply, and bit her lip, for a moment mortified at the thought it might go off and accidentally blow out her brains-or that John might panic and say something or try to make a run for it. Then Lucky was down, reclining on the other side, the end of the double-barrels resting against the vent, one of his hands resting light on her back just at the foot of her spine as though in gentle reassurance, an incongruous contrast to the sensation of having the gun at her head. Then the bell rang again and below them John came into view. She noticed that he'd taken the time to pour himself another drink before he left the living room. In the silence that followed the ringing of the doorbell she could hear the ice-cubes tinkling in the glass.
He opened the door and stepped back as two police, their head and shoulders hooded under army blankets, barged through. Through the door she glimpsed the black of the night, the windswept sand, heard the roar of the storm. Then one of the troopers closed the door. They shed the blankets, shaking out the sand with disregard for the carpet beneath their feet, and after what appeared a moment of orientation, they fixed their attention finally on John, who was silently sipping his drink.
Still no one spoke. The silence seemed unbearable. Daria was acutely conscious of the gun-barrel against the side of her head, of the hand resting light on the small of her back, of the beating of her heart and the low strained gasping of her breath.
Then John toasted and took another sip of his drink. "Is there something I can do for you officers?"
"Sorry to barge in on you like that," one of the cops said, catching his breath.
"Just not much time for introductions with that sand whippin' into your ears," the other drawled amiably.
There was another brief moment of silence. John turned slightly and Daria was able to glimpse his face. He looked speechless, but he looked drunk, and perhaps, she thought, the police would interpret that as the cause of his silence.
"This your place here?" one of the troopers asked, looking at him studiously.
"No ... It's ... uh ... a friend's of mine, Major English?"
"Major in now?" asked the cop.
"No, he's gone ... down to Yuma for a couple of days."
Again there was silence, then suddenly Daria's body stiffened and she jerked her head quickly around as she felt Lucky's hand move lower down her back, sliding right down over the full tightly rounded swells of her buttocks, hardly protected beneath the flimsy material of her short skirt and her clinging little panties.
In the darkness of the attic she stared wild-eyed at him, stifling the cry that almost burst verbally from her lips. She could still feel the pistol barrel pressed hard against the side of her head. She was fearfully conscious of the double barrel shotgun lying on the floor between them. In the faint light coming up through the vent she could see his eyes, gleaming like an animal's framed in headlights on the road at night. Behind her she could hear Hank's tense, nervous breathing. And of the voices of the police and her husband below she was now only dimly aware.
Daria shook her head in feeble muted protest as she felt Lucky's hand seize the hem of her skirt and tug it slowly upward. She strained her neck, looking back over her shoulder almost in disbelief as he exposed the ripely clenched half-moons of her panty-clad little ass. Then it was everything she could do to keep from screaming as he seized the waistband at the top of her panties and pulled them right down over the clenching, tightly pliant rounds.
Oh God, she thought, it was too terrible to believe. Here she was in this dark dingy attic lying on the floor between these two armed and desperate prison escapees whose crimes she still hadn't dared ask. One of them held a gun to her head and the other had his hand on her ass and if she made the slightest sound it would cost three or four people their lives.
Helplessly Daria tried to clench her hips in defense. But even that was of no avail. A little shudder of shame and humiliation coursed over her prone and half-naked body as Lucky left the panties clutching midway down to her knees and drew his fingers back up along the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, forcing his middle finger down between them to stroke the straining tendons, drawing gradually higher and higher until she jerked slightly from the sudden contact of the finger right on the tingling slit of her cunt.
"Car down the road there," one of the state-troopers was saying. "Know anything about that?"
"That's uh ... that's mine. The Chevrolet?"
"Yeah. Trouble ... ?"
Daria could have almost died of shame as she felt Lucky's finger slip easily between the already lewdly moistened lips of her cunt. Her fear and her helplessness in this disgraceful situation seemed to have instilled some perverse masochistic reflex in her body. Her vaginal lips were completely lubricated, as if they'd been waiting for his caress, and she held her breath as she felt his long, distended middle finger worm its way slowly upward, parting the pinkly yielding folds of flesh to probe straight up into her sensitive and tender little cunt.
She bit her lip, tears welling to her eyes at the smile that spread across the convict's lips. Another shiver coursed up her spine as he wiggled his finger deep up in the tight warm crevice of her loins, and she could have almost gone out of her mind from the sheer unwelcome delight of it all as he flicked his thumb up beneath her body to tweak suddenly over the lust inflamed head of her wantonly dilated clitoris.
Oh, God, Daria whispered silently in her mind. It was all so crazy, at once so good and terrible she couldn't believe it was even real. All the frustration and all the lust that had remained with her after her un-fulfilling defloration last night at the hands of her over eager husband seemed to have been brought rudely back to the surface. She could feel the flutters of maddening excitement spiraling out of control through her desire-tortured loins. She was still afraid for her life, yet even her fear took second place to the maddening lust coursing through her body. Lucky was finger-fucking swiftly now, drawing the deeply protruding digit in long teasing strokes in and out of the clutching elastic hole of flesh, his thumb tweaking with nerve-shattering effect over the twitching little clitoral bud nestled at the top of the quivering hair-lined slip.
"Haven't seen any ... strangers snoopin' around?" one of the cops was asking.
"No. No, been here ... all alone. Just sort of ... getting drunk and talking to myself."
"Well. Guess that's all then. I'd get that car off the road as soon as I could. Ain't no place to leave a good lookin' vehicle like that. Out here'n this desert, somebody'll strip it before you can say Jack Sprat."
Up in the attic Daria at first didn't even grasp what was happening. She was vaguely conscious of John bidding goodbye to the policeman, of the door opening and closing as the men ventured back out into the storm. She was aware of Hank sighing and lowering the pistol from her head, of Lucky leaning forward and kissing her now almost tenderly on the lips as his hand began an even more rapid ravishment of her now open-splayed and surrendered loins from behind. She gritted her teeth, her head flailing from side to side in insincere protest as she relished the first anticipatory spasms of her lustfully aroused little swollen clitoris. Unconsciously she began to strain for her release as she felt the increasing tremors of excitement surging relentlessly through her belly and loins. She made a low half-conscious whimpering sound, gripped by the delirium of the promise surging all through her cock-hungry vaginal flesh.
Then gradually it began, just a fluttering, a little series of mild but pleasing spasms deep up in her loins, a seeming lightening of her whole body, as if she were floating, a blanking of her mind, a lifting as the little waves of wanton ecstasy coursed over her.
Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun it was over. A low sigh heaved from her throat and she blinked as Lucky gave a couple of last deep thrusts up into her cunt and withdrew his finger with a pop. He straightened up, looking down at her in triumph as she lay dazed and disoriented on the attic floor.
"Now you like that, baby. Don't tell me you didn't."
"Oh my God," Daria said in a sob. "Oh ... Oh ... go to hell, would you."
She jerked her dress violently down over her ass-cheeks and tugged her panties up. Hank, his eyes gleaming with excitement, helped her to her feet. Downstairs John was calling:
"Daria? They're gone. Daria? Hey, you guys. They're gone. Hey, what are you doing with my wife up there?"
Five
Outside the storm still raged. It was getting late. Daria had no idea really what time it was. The sandwich platter, now almost clean, rested on the coffee table before the couch. Lucky sat drinking whisky in the rocking chair before the empty fireplace. Hank, still stone sober, was pacing back before the window. Daria sat in the easy chair. She'd pulled her feet up onto the cushion, planted flat on it so her knees stuck up before her breasts and she could rest her forearm across them and rest her chin on her forearm. Across the room, his eyes glazed from alcohol, John sat on the couch, a drink in his hand.
"Really a great honeymoon, huh honey?" he said with a pathetic little laugh. "You thought you were gonna have one man and instead you got three."
He drank, paused and laughed and drank again. Daria remembered leaving the attic on wobbly legs. The two convicts went down first. John was waiting with them at the bottom of the ladder, staring up at her, staring up her skirt as if he could see what had just happened to her. And she was still trembling in post-orgasmic shame and delight, her mind reeling with the lurid visions of what had just happened. It was so awful she didn't know if she would ever be able to look at herself in the mirror again. And yet it had felt so good, so good ...
"Hey Lucky!" John said drunkenly. "Look at my wife's cunt. That's it, the sort of brown hairy thing you can see through her panties. Hey, open wider honey, your legs."
Daria dropped her feet angrily down the floor and smoothed her skirt down her thighs. She noticed Hank was staring at her, intent, fascinated. His voice echoed in her ears from earlier in the afternoon. "Been over seven years since I been in an air conditioned room ... " And it had been over seven years, then, since ... He turned suddenly away, resumed his pacing. He paced back and forth across the room several times, then abruptly walked out the door and away down the hall.
"Yesterday afternoon she was still a virgin," John was saying in his slurred drunken voice. "Now I bet you don't believe that. But it's the truth. We've been going together for a whole year, and she saved it. We saved it, together, the two of us. I saved it too, I mean, I cooperated ... ."
"Oh can it, John," Daria said tiredly. She got up suddenly, feeling the eyes of both men on her trim shapely body as she walked toward the door.
"Regular gangster's moll, isn't that right Lucky? Guess you know more about that than I do. Hey, what were you guys doing with her up there while I was down here talking those troopers off you're trail? You know how I know that? I bet you don't. I could smell it, that's how. Yeah, I could smell it and I could see it in her eyes! So come on, old buddy. Let's have the story, the whole dirty joke, hunh?"
His voice faded away as Daria walked down the hall. Just as she started through the door to the kitchen she heard Lucky interrupt him: "Come on, friend. Have another drink ... "
Hank stood at the oven, heating water for a cup of coffee. He started, whirling at the sound of her footsteps, then saw her and smiled. "I'm jumpy."
"Yes." Daria smiled also. "I would be too if I were you. I'm jumpy myself, and I'm not even on the run." He didn't seem to be listening. He was staring at her body, like he'd never seen a woman's body before, that same way he'd been staring when he first saw her that afternoon. She was standing two feet away from him. She almost thought she could feel his eyes burning into her breasts, right through the cups of her bra. She could hear his low hoarse breathing. She felt she should turn and run from him, or something, but for some reason she couldn't seem to move.
"You beautiful ... " he said in a cracked voice. Kind of broken, cave man English, she was thinking. "All these years I ... "
He didn't finish the sentence.
"Hank ... "
"You ... "
"Hank ... " She shook her head. She managed a little laugh and backed a pace away. "Tell me ... tell me about Lucky."
He heaved out a sigh and turned away to check the water for the coffee, then turned slowly back. "Lucky's all right."
"I guess ... I guess you saw what happened up there. You must think I'm some kind of whore. I don't know. It just happened. And now John, in there. He's acting like such an ... an asshole. Tell me about Lucky. Why was he ... in prison."
"He just got in a little trouble ... a while back. Long time ago."
"Yes, but what did he do?"
"Aw, that's all past now," Hank said and occupied himself with the making of his coffee. "Want some?"
"No thanks," said Daria. She turned to the sink and stared out the window into the black of the night-raging storm. Then she started as she felt the hand touch her arm. When she turned he was staring at her the same way he had before, now standing even closer, his breath coming in hoarse guttural pants from deep in his throat. "Hank, no," she said flatly. "No, please. Don't look at me like that."
"You dunno what it's like," he said. "All that time ... all those years. I just ... I just want to touch you ... to see ... "
His hands came up and covered over the soft firm swell of one of her proudly upstanding breasts, squeezing and massaging it as though more with fascination than lust, testing it's gentle pliancy and firmness, the pressure of his palm on her nipple causing the little bud to swell to tingling rigidity within the confines of her bra.
Her whole body trembling with an eerie, but hardly sexual excitement, Daria stood her ground and allowed the desperate little man to feel her breasts. She could see the hunger in his eyes, and through her own mind's eye raced a flood of almost surreal images of prison life, short film clips from movies she'd seen, incidents she'd read now visualized in stark grotesquerie, sordid hallucinations of loneliness and despair. And somehow she couldn't bring herself to stop him. Though she thought she could have died from it all she didn't have in her heart the cruelty to deny what it seemed to be costing her so little to give.
She let him pull the sweater up from her skirt. She shuddered as his hands slipped beneath it, moving up the rib-outlined side of her slender torso up beneath her arm, slipping into the bra cup from the side to cup over her breast and find the already tautly swollen tip of her nipple. Then he pushed the constricting cup up and off the tautly swollen mound, shoving the sweater also up with a lifting of his arm so her tight high set breast was completely visible to his gaze, the pink wide-corona nipple almost visibly pulsing in simple physical response to the contact of his hand upon it. He groaned, lunging suddenly forward to plant his lips right over the hard throbbing little bud, at the same time seizing one of her wrists and jerking her hand forcibly down to the crotch of his trousers, pressing it full over the almost mind-bogglingly enormous bulge of his fully erected cock.
"Ooooouuuuu!" Daria whimpered from the sheer raw sensation as the escaped convict sucked and nibbled at her nakedly exposed breast, grinding his pelvis in a series of rapidly jerking motions as he held her hand pressed forcibly to the hard shaft of his sperm laden cock looming up inside his white, prison-issue trousers. Then suddenly she heard him groan, bitting down even harder on her tortured little nipple. Then the groan was followed by a low sigh. He let her breast and her now urgently tingling nipple slip lightly from his lips. He released her hand and let it fall away from his crotch, stepping back and staring shamefully down at the floor before at last he seemed to get the courage to raise his sheepish eyes to her.
"Aw hell, Miss," he said with obvious embarrassment. "Boy, I'm like a kid or something."
Daria smiled in spite of her strained breathing. Self-consciously she tugged the bra-cup back down over her exposed breast, pulled her sweater back down over her breasts and belly and tucked it into her skirt. She felt flushed, her nerves raw and on edge. The convict was still standing very close to her, still blushing like an embarrassed adolescent. And yet there was an expression of contentment, even triumph on his mug-shot face, and though she knew she should be ashamed, she felt a perverse and almost motherly pleasure at the knowledge of the pleasure she'd given him, still at such little cost to herself. Then, suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him soft on the cheek, turned and walked quickly out of the room and down the hall.
"Where's my wife?" she heard John's drunken voice say from the den. "Where is that beautiful whore?"
"She ain't gone far," said Lucky. "Here, lemme fill your glass."
She paused for a moment, then tiptoed slowly forward, listening to their almost chummy chatter.
"Thank you," John said. "Even for a jailbird you are a gentleman and a scholar. Now let's drink to something. What do you want to drink to?"
"We'll drink to you," Lucky said drily.
"Yes, fine. Here's to me. Bottoms up."
She reached the door and stopped, stood framed in it gazing into the room. The two men were standing up, John weaving on his feet, Lucky steady as a tree, watching him almost without expression. They held up their glasses and drank, Lucky taking only a sip, John draining his own to the bottom. Her husband turned shakily and hurled the glass, shattering it in the fireplace. Then he turned again, looked at her, smiled a silly drunken smile and said:
"Well, my blushing bride. Come dear, I think we should find a bedroom and do a little of the old in and out."
She looked at Lucky, briefly met his smoldering, knowing gaze. He was reaching to the liquor cabinet for another glass. Then, looking again at John, he moved away from the cabinet. John teetered. An idiot's grin came over his lips. His eyes went blank, rolling back so she could see nothing but the whites. Daria gave out with a warning gasp as she realized what was going to happen. Lucky caught him just before he would have hit the floor on his back.
Six
As Daria watched with dreadful fascination, the muscular convict hoisted her husband over his shoulder and carried him out of the room. Her own body was still tingling with excitement from the bizarrely titillating incident that had just taken place between her and the other con, and the knowing look that had been exchanged between her and Lucky just before John had passed out left her trembling with a kind of resigned excitement. She knew that he'd intentionally gotten John drunk with this in mind. Yet in a way that could be taken as a sign of kindness in his nature. He didn't have to do it this way. He could just take her if he wanted to. He could have taken her upstairs earlier after he'd finger fucked her to a swift and rousing climax. There wasn't a thing she could have done or would have wanted to do to stop him.
Hoping to calm her own shattered nerves, Daria walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a stiff shot of gin. She diluted it with cold water from the melted ice, drank half of it down and paused, staring pensively at the dark window. Then her gaze shifted slightly, her eyes widening slowly as the shotgun, leaning against the wall, seemed to materialize gradually into her view. It seemed at first as if she were only seeing things, and she blinked, half expecting that it would go away. But when she looked again it was still there, waiting, loaded and deadly, hers for the taking.
Daria didn't even know how long it was that she stood there, immobilized, staring at the gun. Through her mind raced a jumble of conflicting images. She was aware that this should be her and John's moment of deliverance, and yet she could not think of it that way. She felt as though she were merely being offered a chance she didn't want; a chance to escape that held no appeal. She knew that she should feel honor bound to take it, as a citizen and as a wife. But she knew equally well that, short of actually using it and killing the two convicts who'd made her and John their prisoner, there really wasn't anything she could do with the shotgun. They weren't going to allow her to turn them in. Her husband was passed out, and no help. And she couldn't stand guard over them all night alone.
"Tempting, ain't it?"
Daria's body jerked at the sound of Lucky's voice behind her. She looked again briefly at the shotgun, then half-turned to look at him, standing in the door drawing lazily on a cigarette.
"Go ahead," he said with a grin. "If you want to."
Daria's heart was pounding frantically in her breasts and her indignation at the way he was mocking her was almost more than she could stand. He was daring her to go for the gun, offering it to her because from the door there was no way he could beat her to it. But she didn't have the nerve, and he knew it.
"I ... I'm not against you and Hank," she said in a quivering voice.
"I know," Lucky drawled. "And I have known it from the first time I held you in my arms and kissed your lovely little lips."
"I didn't mean it that way," Daria snapped, her face flushing red. "I just meant that I don't want to see you go back to prison. I don't know what you did but I sense from ... from both of you ... that you're not bad people. And I for one am certainly not in favor of the prison system in this country today or of the ... " He was just smiling at her in ridicule, and she realized her tirade must sound completely ridiculous to him. There was no use going on, and she tried to compose herself and inject a little formality into her voice before she added: "Now, where did you put my husband?"
"I dumped in on the bed in that back bedroom. He's all right. I even took his shoes off so he could sleep more comfortable."
"That's very kind of you. Now I think I'll go join him as well. I'm tired and it's ... it's, to say the least, been a busy day."
"Yeah," Lucky agreed. "And it's not over yet."
He took the cigarette from his lips and tossed it to the floor. He stomped it out with his foot and as Daria waited, trembling with fear and anticipation, he came walking slowly forward.
Daria almost melted beneath the convict's leering gaze as he approached. Then he was upon her, his arms around her pulling her body forcibly against his own, his mouth again covering hard over his lips, his tongue slipping in between her teeth to slither deep into her mouth as his hands dropped to the clenched half-moons of her buttocks to jerk her loins almost violently against his own.
The defenselessly excited brunette gave out with a muffled groan as she felt the surging of his cock erection, that tented the convict's trousers pushing right up the sensitive softness of her own inner thighs. His hands had again worked the short miniskirt far up off her hips and the thinly haired mound of her pubis was protected by nothing but the flimsy silken crotch-band of her panties. She could feel the prodding hardness right on the fear-moistened lips of her cunt and the friction against the warmly responding flesh was almost driving her out of her mind. She felt completely helpless, almost without a will to resist after everything else that had already happened to her today, and even as she squirmed in feeble and half-hearted protest she was sucking his tongue even deeper and more eagerly into her opened panting mouth.
"Emmmmmmmnn," Daria moaned in spite of herself as she felt Lucky's fingers stabbing viciously into the panty-clad cheeks of her ass. She could feel the strength and masculinity that seemed to exude from his work-hardened body, and the thought that she was probably the first woman this strong and red-blooded young male had touched in years only increased the perverse thrills cursing through her loins. She knew what she was doing was wrong. She knew she was cheapening herself by responding to the embrace of another man only two days after her marriage, and she knew that her harsh judgment of John, her refusal to stand by him solidly in this time of difficulty and danger, only made what she was doing all the more sinful. But now in spite of that knowledge she couldn't bring herself to think of her husband in a light any kinder than apathy or pity. And the exciting contrast of being taken by this hulking animal brute seemed more than her newly awakened flesh could resist.
A ravishing shock of delight danced along Daria's spine as Lucky tugged her sweater out of her skirt and ran one of his hands up beneath it to press over the firmness of her bra-encumbered breast, continuing to claw and maul at the silk covered cheeks of her ass with the other. She was still feebly struggling, conscious there was no hope that she would be able to free herself from his powerful embrace. Her mouth was open wide, his tongue still searching deep between her lips, and she could only shudder as though in acquiescence as he moved his hand lower down off her buttocks to work his fingers up between her thighs from behind and began to stroke back and forth along the hair-lined lips of her pussy from the outside of the already wetly-moistened crotchband of her panties.
Then at last with a desperate effort Daria managed to pull her lips away from his, drawing back from his face slightly and gasping to catch her breath. But he still held her firmly in his grasp, the one hand up beneath her sweater mauling and pawing urgently at the lust-swollen mounds of her breasts, pushing the brassiere cups up and off them to completely free the luscious spheres of flesh to his groping exploration. His other hand was still pressed far up between her thighs from behind, his fingers tugging the crotchband of her panties aside to stroke eagerly through the sensitive upstanding curls of wet pubic hair.
"Oh please," Daria moaned, shaking her head. "I'm a married woman, Lucky. This is supposed to be my honeymoon."
"Hell I don't care," Lucky grunted, an animalistic grin contorting his handsome face.
Then an even more violent shudder racked Daria's body as his finger made sudden delicious contact with the throbbing little tip of her clitoris, tweaking rapidly over the pulsing little bud as she continued her half-hearted efforts to free herself from his grasp. He continued to work at the little digit until it had swollen to fully pulsing rigidity, then slowly he dragged his fingers back along the lust-dilated lips of her cunt. Then, without a warning, he reached his other hand beneath her arm and in a sudden deft motion undid the snap of her brassiere, at the same time working his finger out of the clinging panty-crotchband to leave her gasping from the sudden absence of the titillating sensation she'd derived.
Then, before Daria had quite had time to grasp what was happening, he seized the tail of her sweater and pulled it swiftly upward. It seemed that in some congenital reflex she raised her arms straight above her head and he lifted the sweater off and tossed it away, leaving her almost naked from the waist up, her blonde hair tosseled into disarray, her bra hanging precariously off the high-arched swells of her swollen breasts, her eyes looking wild and shocked and filled with lust as she watched him reach up to push the bra straps off her shoulders. Then the little garment fell to the floor, leaving nothing but her low-hanging panties and the short miniskirt bunched in relative uselessness at her waist.
Lucky sucked his breath in hoarsely, taking a step back away from her as though to better survey a painting or some other work of art. For a moment he was silent, his eyes roving intently over her soft gold-tanned curves of flesh, his mouth hanging almost slack as he breathed in hoarse guttural groans. Then at last he spoke:
"I'll be gaddamn! I guess I really forgot. I was beginning to think I never would see anything like this again."
Daria waited, trembling before his hungrily devouring gaze. She was equally conscious of her nakedness and vulnerability, and that awareness only intensified the urgency of her breathing and the pounding of her heart. She felt as she never had in her life like a piece of flesh, a sex object to be used and cast away. She knew she wouldn't resist, knew resistance was useless. Lucky was an escaped fugitive, fleeing for his life. She knew from his threat about using the shotgun earlier tonight when the police had stopped at the house that he was really desperate. He wasn't going to be taken alive. That he had made very clear to both her and John. And with that understanding she had to face the fact that he had faced the reality of the possibility of his imminent death. And knowing he might die anytime, he wasn't going to pass up such a tasty morsel from life as he was faced with now. And the fact that she was being forced to commit adultery on only the second night of her marriage was a coincidence nothing more. It would have happened anytime she'd found herself in this situation with a man like him. It would have been inevitable even if she'd still been a virgin.
Then another excited little shiver coursed up her spine as Lucky reached down to the side of her skirt and undid the snap and drew the zipper slowly down. The little garment dropped several inches, caught for a precarious moment on the flare of her ass, then fell away and dropped down her long slender thighs to come to rest on the floor at her feet. Automatically she stepped out of them. Then her eyes narrowed as he stepped back and kissed her hungrily on the lips, crushing her near-naked body in his strong arms, the bulging meaty erection of his cock in his trousers grinding hard against her panty-covered cunt before he raised his hands up to her shoulders to push her firmly downward toward the floor.
A little moan of submission rose in Daria's throat as she sank down to her knees before the powerfully muscled convict. He'd already untied his brogan work shoes and it was a simple matter for him to kick them off. Then her eyes widened with shock, as he undid his trousers and pulled them suddenly downward to free the lust-hardened shaft of his almost outrageously enormous cock. My God, it was enormous, pulsing purplish with the foreskin pulled back to reveal the angry blood-filled head. It was almost twice the size of John's and her tender little vagina was still sore from her defloration just the night before. She could never take that inside her. It would rip her apart. It would be even worse than the initial rupture of her hymen by her more normally endowed husband.
"Oh no," Daria said in a whisper, shaking her head in feeble protest as Lucky dropped down to the floor before her. The lust in his eyes looking at her almost naked body was like nothing she'd ever seen in her life. His penis was looming up from his thickly crotch like a menacing sharpened sword, and she could feel a desperate flutter of fright as she reminded herself that after everything he must have endured during the years of his imprisonment her feeble protests would seem a matter of relative triviality. She knew there would be no escape, and she knew by that her actions since she and her husband had found themselves prisoners of these two sexually deprived fugitives she deserved everything she was going to get.
Then again his hands were upon her, cupping hard over the proudly upstanding swells of her breasts, his fingers tweaking and squeezing the already hard-swollen buds of her nipples until she almost cried out. She sat nearly motionless, making no move to resist, staring down through glazed eyes at the mauling of the near stranger's calloused hands over the soft supple flesh of her naked torso.
"Ooooouuuuuuuuu," Daria moaned in spite of herself as he took one of her rigid nipples between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it teasingly between the two digits to prompt it to distend even more distinctly out from the vibrantly rounded mound of her naked breast. Then his hands cupped back over the two nipple peaked swells, crushing them against her slender rib cage before slipping beneath her arms to push her forcibly backward.
Shaking her head in feeble and futile objection, Daria sank down without resistance into a reclining position on the floor. Her eyes were now opened wide, glazed, her lips slightly parted and jaw slack as she watched Lucky survey her prone and trembling form. Then she shuddered slightly as his hands moved lower down over the smooth plane of her stomach to seize the tight elastic waistband of her white silken panties and draw them slowly down off the forbidden triangle of the hair of her cunt. She automatically arched her buttocks up to facilitate their removal. Then he peeled the little garment down her long slender thighs and calves, and tossed them away to leave her completely naked before his leering gaze.
"Oh God help me," Daria prayed in silent mental entreaty as the convict's hands trailed over the tender flesh of her pelvis, venturing almost cautiously into the soft curls of cunt-hair between her thighs. She could see a dazed look in his eyes, not the worship she'd seen in John's eyes the night before when he'd first gazed upon her naked body, but something else, more intense, profound. He was looking at her as a possession, as though a spoil of battle, a prize to be taken and exploited.
Daria's whole naked body was tightened with fear and lust as Lucky reclined forward, planting his knees between her thighs and forcing them out wide apart to give her even greater access to her fur-lined little pussy orifice. In spite of all her fear and shame she derived a certain secret enjoyment from the very hopelessness of her situation, and as he dropped forward on top of her she closed her eyes, reaching up with her hands to explore with wonder over the rippling muscles of his torso, savoring the strong male smell of his body, her lips opening willingly to his tongue as he kissed her again hard on the mouth.
"Oooooooooooh," the prone and naked blonde moaned into Lucky's mouth as she felt the length of his hard male cock prodding up higher between her thighs until the tip of it was poised but inches away from the softly-haired pouting lips of her pussy. She sighed with forbidden delight, squirming even more tightly against the hotly breathing male until the lust-bloated head of his gigantic penis was twitching right against the passion-wetted little orifice of her still near virgin-tight cunt. She still couldn't face the thought of actually taking him inside her, but now in the sheer physical delight of his strong body and his strong authoritarian will she'd temporarily suspended the consciousness of that gnawing fear in the back of her mind. And somehow the fear seemed to only increase the delirious lust surging through her loins and breasts as she felt his hand stroke straight up along her moistened pussy slit to find sudden shattering contact with the lewdly erected little bud of her clitoris nestled so invitingly at the top.
Daria knew she would probably never forgive herself for her salacious action, but the things that were happening to her body now were completely beyond her comprehension and control and she began to swivel her hips up and down from the floor in a prematurely abandoned fucking motion as Lucky's fingers parted the passion-drenched folds of her vagina. She wriggled downward on the floor onto the lust-hardened cock-head lurched suddenly into shocking pressure with the flushed entrance of her cunt, and as she squirmed her buttocks down into the carpet in automatic retreat from the frightening sensation Lucky craned his neck and bent down to take one of her tingling nipples hungrily into his mouth.
"Yesssssssssss," Daria moaned in shameless surrender to the further maddening sensations racing through her loins and belly, and she opened her eyes wide and peered downward to watch Lucky's tongue swipe eagerly over the rigidly swelling little nipple. He sucked hungrily, switching from one breast to the other, rubbing his face into the voluptuously deep valley of her cleavage between them. Then abruptly he raised up, staring at her with almost animal excitement, gasping to catch his breath as he reached down between their bodies and seized the enormous thick hardness of his cock, guiding it again up toward her helplessly open-splayed cunt.
"Easy!" Daria gasped, her body stiffening beneath him as she felt a sudden even sharper pressure against the sensitive hair-lined lips. "Oh! Oh, it's too big!"
Daria just glimpsed the slight smirk that crossed Lucky's face at that flattering remark, then she was almost blinded by the sheer raw sensation as he surged forward even harder, withdrawing his hand from between their bodies and seizing her tightly by the wrists as she started to struggle against the enormous and almost unbearable invasion of her tender little cunt.
"Aaaaaaagggghhhhhhh!" Daria cried as the convict's thick bulbous cock-head wedged itself up between her tightly resisting hair-lined pussy lips. "Oh my God, Lucky. It is too big. I can't take it. Let me go!"
But there was no escape and in spite of all her struggles the straining cock-shaft skewered its way slowly up into her tightly clasping inner vaginal tightness, its force and power pushing aside all her resistance, spreading and parting her lust-seared inner cuntal walls until she thought she would pass out from the ceaselessly burning sensation. It seemed to tear into her forever, filling her beyond belief as she quivered and shuddered helplessly beneath him. Then she let out a low hoarse sigh as she at last felt the bloated rubbery tip lodge itself hard against her cervix and Lucky's lust-weighted balls bounced heavily down between the clenching cheeks of her ass.
"Oh God," she moaned, hardly able to believe she hadn't lost consciousness during the excruciating ordeal but relieved at least that the initial penetration was ended. Her sultry lips were loose and panting and her eyes were open wide. Her thighs scissored slowly open and closed on Lucky's tensed flanks. Otherwise she lay completely motionless, afraid to even move in her fear of the hotly piercing shaft of flesh embedded to the depths of her cunt like a sword into a sheath, and she could only pray that the convict would give her elastic vaginal muscles time to adjust to the lewd intrusion into her loins. But she could feel the excited trembling of his body above her, see the look of lust and triumph and seeming near disbelief in his wild crazy eyes, and she knew she could expect little mercy.
Then suddenly, as though in warning, he flexed his cock and it seemed to grow even large, stabbing even deeper up in her loins to cause a little spasm to shake her whole naked body. He grinned as she gritted her teeth from the sharp stabbing sensation, then suddenly flicked his hips forward to grind his pubic mound hard against her tingling clitoris and plunge the heated shaft of his cock even harder against the sensitive little nub of her cervix.
"Ooooooooh!" Daria whimpered, flailing her head gently from side to side on the floor to whip her long blonde hair softly over her naked shoulders. She sucked her breath in with a low hissing sound as he slowly withdrew, pulling the length of his cock almost all the way out of the clasping sheath of her cunt until just the head was I buried between the tight elastic hair-lined lips. Then she gasped as he lunged forward again to surge slowly back up into her quivering cuntal tightness, the force of the surging penetration sweeping aside all her renewed, though fainter resistance. Her whole body jerked as his pubis mashed hard against the soft-haired mound of her cunt and once more she was skewered to the hilt. Then he kissed her again on the lips, his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth as he began a steady hunching rhythm, sweat beading on his muscled chest and her own hard-crushed breasts as his rigidly erected cock-shaft pistoned again and again into the coral-hued slit of her cunt.
"God, God!" Daria moaned, her eyes goggling as she tried to accustom herself to the obscene and unnatural intrusion. Her nakedly rounded breasts joggled from the jerkings of her lust-racked body and she groaned in lecherous submission, thrusting her pelvis up in a wanton squirming motion as she began to match his hard-driving thrusts, grinding her pubis eagerly against his in urgent stimulation of her twitching little clitoris.
Now Daria's nakedly writhing body was aflame with unprecedented fiery sensation. She felt as if she were sinking forever into a nether-world of perverted pleasure. She knew she was betraying the vows and faith of her marriage, that she was betraying all the moral stamina and conviction that had enabled her to go just yesterday a virgin to her marriage bed, but she almost seemed to relish her wrong-doing and the deliciously frenzied movements of Lucky's cock driving ever more swiftly in and out of her loins provoked in her something she had not even glimpsed last night when she'd given herself to her husband.
Now Lucky was really letting himself go. His hands were mauling ruthlessly over Daria's squirming naked body, his hard driving lunges racking her with their violence and force. She felt like she was being raped by a wild animal, being taken cruelly and by force. This was really fucking, completely unleashed animal fury, and the sheer intensity of his assault was having a psychological impact that only increased and intensified her physical receptivity. The hand-inflicted orgasm he'd given her earlier when he'd taken advantage of her in the attic had served as further preparation, and her eyelids fluttered as she twitched and hunched beneath him, she was totally lost in the intensity of her want and the promise of her release, excitement ever mounting as she clenched his massive cock into the most sensitive recesses of her dilated inner pussy tightness.
Then suddenly Lucky moved into a series of longer and more swiftly plunging strokes, ramming his hard shaft of cock-flesh again and again to the hilt into the virginal blonde's undulating loins. His balls were slapping into the crack of her ass against her sensitively puckered little anus, this added weird sensation only causing her to thrash even more rapidly beneath him. They were both building now toward the end, the wet flat smack of his loins against her pelvis echoing and resounding through the room as he craned his neck to again take one of her erectly throbbing little nipples into his mouth, nibbling and biting at the little bud to prompt further whimpers of longing and submission to rise to her lips.
Then suddenly his cock flexed and pulsed even larger and harder up into her loins. The lust-swollen head seemed to flare and grow until she feared it would tear all the way up into her belly. She threw her arms tightly around his laboring, sweating back, hugging him tightly to her as she felt the energy surging between their bodies like an electric current, filling her, charging her, pushing her almost beyond the brink of delirium as his lunging thrusts built to a crescendo and she felt the first awe-inspiring waves of her own long awaited climax surging through her body with volcanic, mind boggling fury.
"Oh God yes!" Daria cried out in final submission, dropping her hands down to grasp the convict's churning buttocks and pull him even tighter to her. She arched her loins up in a violent bucking motion grinding her impaled cunt in luxuriating little circles, spiraling it frenziedly up and down the hotly burrowing penis as she felt the waves of ecstasy and delight go coursing out frenziedly over her ravished flesh.
Daria's body quivered completely out of control. The rosy hue of her face brightened and dampened and her whimpers rose to urgent piercing cries as the fluids of her vagina flowed freely forth to mingle with the hot thick drops of male semen pumping in a furious torrent into her loins.
"Oh yes, God yes!" she cried out, unable to hold herself back any longer. "I'm cumming. Oh my God, I'mmmm cuummmiinnnnnggg!"
Lucky jammed his pumping cock all the way to the hilt into Daria's hotly contracting vagina, his sperm erupting in deep cannon like droplets that flooded deep into her womb. He continued to fuck into her until every ounce of his seed was spent, until she'd already sank in motionless repose beneath him on the floor. Then he sighed out his breath and sagged heavily down upon her. Beneath him Daria purred like a grateful satisfied kitten.
Seven
When Daria awoke the next morning the storm had passed. She lay on the bed beneath a light blanket in the back bedroom where Lucky had carried John after he'd passed out the night before. She was wearing her skirt and sweater, without her brassiere. She was alone now; John had already arisen and left the room.
For what must have been several minutes Daria lay still on her side, staring out the window at the endless sunlit expanse of the land. Now there was silence, stillness; it was as if the storm had been only a bad dream.
Then the other dream-like memory crept slowly and insidiously into her consciousness. She stiffened, a little gasp rising in her throat, her beautiful sultry face contorting slightly at the lascivious vision that suddenly gripped her shame-tortured mind. And that was no dream either. Though she found it almost too horrible for belief, she knew that it was real. It was real as the storm, but unlike the storm it would not have left without a trace. The scars remained. She sensed them immediately, the emotional scar she thought would never quite completely heal, and the physical scars on her slightly bruised, aching and exhausted body.
Oh my God, she thought. What on earth could have come over me? She, who had guarded her chastity for so long, had been unfaithful to her husband on the second night of their marriage. She had given in freely to a man she didn't even know, a criminal on the run. And as much as she now wished she could justify what had happened by calling it rape, she knew that to do so would be distorting the truth. He hadn't raped her.. Perhaps he would have, if it had come to that. But it had not been necessary to use force. She'd given herself too freely.
"It must have been the alcohol," Daria whispered, tossing the blanket off and sitting up in bed. "Yes. I was very drunk," she added, as though it were an entreaty to herself to believe her own remark. It was true, however. She had been very drunk, though with all the strain and tension she'd been through during the day she'd hardly realized how drunk she was. And what had taken place between her and the convict probably would not have taken place if it hadn't been for the alcohol. Or at least it would have happened in a much different way. But that was still no excuse. If it took nothing but a few glasses of gin to turn her into a nymphomaniacal whore then her state was a pitiful one indeed.
A lump of remorse and shame welling in her throat, Daria stepped off the bed and stood up. She surveyed herself silently for a moment in the dresser mirror, surprised that no trace of last night's lascivious episode showed in her face. She would have thought that after everything she had done and after everything she'd allowed Lucky to do to her she would have been marked, like Cain had been marked after he killed his brother Abel.
And yet, just the memory Lucky's hands roving over the soft naked curves of her body, his lips kissing and sucking at the sensitive nipples of her breasts, his gigantic cock ripping into her tender little cunt, inspired in her now a stirring excitement that couldn't be denied. Wicked and shameful as it was, it had been the most wonderful physical experience Daria had ever known in her life and she experienced a renewed fluttering in her loins and breasts that only served to further impress on her guilt-tortured mind the level of degradation to which she had sunk. And that was the worst part of all: Deep down inside she wasn't even sorry.
Daria turned away from the mirror and walked slowly over to the window. She stood peering silently out, then slowly and quietly raised it. She tried the latch on the screen and opened it easily. She sighed, long and loud. She could just leave, right now. She could set out across the desert, parallel to the road. Then she could get back onto the highway and wait for a car to come by. She played with that thought for a few minutes, then re-latched the screen and turned away. She couldn't do it. She didn't want to. And though she tried to tell herself it was because she feared for John's safety if she left him here alone with the two fugitives, she knew the truth was something else.
Daria walked away from the window, out the door and down the hall. She still didn't know how she was going to face John. She thought that though there was no physical mark on her face to attest to what she had done, he would sense it nonetheless. Nor did she relish the thought of having to see the two convicts again. Lucky, and to a lesser extent Hank, had used her like a cheap whore for the gratification of their basest carnal instincts. And even if John might be deluded by what had happened, they knew. They knew what she had done and they knew what she was.
Her heart beating rapidly with her building nervousness, Daria continued slowly down the hall. As she neared the den she heard the television, a morning newscaster giving a summary of national events. As she reached the door he was introducing his colleague, who would give the news on a local level after the next important announcement. Daria paused just outside the door, took a deep breath, then stepped through and stopped again.
Three men looked up at her at once. Hank, wearing a western shirt and a pair of khakis she presumed must belong to the owner of the house, sat on the couch, looking up at her with his eager eyes. John was beside him, staring at her icily. Lucky, still in his white prison pants, lounged in the easy chair. He glanced at her only briefly, nonchalantly, as if she were a possession he took for granted, and somehow that passing glance caused such anger and resentment to swell in Daria's breast that she could almost have spit at him.
Then all attention was returned to the T.V. as the local newscaster began: "Authorities are still searching for two convicts who escaped Tuesday night from the Maximum Security Correctional Facility at Carlton. Believed to be armed and dangerous, the fugitives are suspected to be en route to Mexico." On the screen a grim mug shot of Hank appeared. "Hank Daily, serving five years to life for armed robbery, and Lucas McClain, serving ... "
Hank's mug shot had just been replaced by Lucky's when the younger con suddenly bolted from his chair and flicked off the set, leaving a tense silence over the room. Lucky cast a brief knowing look at Hank, glanced at Daria and looked away. She stared at him, biting her lip. The silence reigned for but a few seconds, but is seemed like an eternity had gone by before John finally broke it:
"Don't want us to hear about it, huh?" John asked in a bitter and sarcastic voice. "What'd you do? Strangle your grandmother? Pull armed robbery at a school for the blind? Molest a child?"
"Shut up Buster."
"Come on, tell us about." John looked at Daria. "You can persuade him honey. I know you can. You've got what it takes."
"Lay off Buster."
"She's my wife."
"I don't give a goddamn," Lucky said, his hand tightening on the shotgun laying across his lap until the knuckles turned white.
"You talk tough with that shotgun," John said.
Lucky shook his head. "Shit. I don't need this shotgun."
Daria watched her husband. He'd almost been smiling, but any trace of humor faded swiftly from his face. He knew it was true. What Daria couldn't understand was the twinge of secret pride she felt at having her "honor" defended by the man who'd so ruthlessly taken and exploited her young body the night before.
"Hank fits pretty well in the clothes that belong to the guy who lives here," Lucky said. "We figure I can get by in Buster's." He looked at John. "Give her the keys."
"Hunh?" John asked, now almost absently.
"We'll let your wife go get the car."
"Me?" Daria asked.
"Yeah, you. And don't get any funny ideas. If you make a run for it or set the police on our tails, Buster here is going to be in bad trouble."
Daria looked him in the eye for a moment. "I'm not going to run."
"Well don't. Buster stays with us until we make the border. Without a car that'd take an awful long time. And if we get shot at ... Buster gets shot at too."
"Can ... can I have some coffee before I go," Daria ventured.
"No," Lucky said with finality. "The longer that car stays on the road the more likely somebody else's gonna start snoopin' around here. Besides, it's just gonna get hotter out there. You know how to drive, I guess."
"Of course I know how to drive," Daria said defensively.
"You'll have to take a water jug, and save most of it for the radiator. You know where to put it in?"
"I know where the radiator is."
"Why her?" John interrupted. "Why don't you send me? I'd attract less attention, if somebody comes by."
Lucky looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then he shook his head. "Naw. She goes. You stay here." He looked at Daria. "If anybody stops, take a ride with 'em if they look all right. But don't bring 'em back here. You'll just be gettin' 'em into trouble."
* * *
The walk had taken almost an hour. She was passed by one truck, going the opposite direction, who had slowed almost to a stop and then sped up when she ignored him. Two cars loaded with vacationing families had passed going the same way as her. Neither of them had stopped, but she was just as glad that they hadn't. She didn't know how she would have reacted to human contact outside of the enclosed little world she'd lived in and somehow adjusted to during the last seventeen or eighteen hours.
Daria finally reached the car, filled the radiator from the rubber container Hank had found in the garage. She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, cleared the sand off the seat where she sat and pulled away. A few minutes later she pulled into the drive in front of the house, after entertaining briefly and again rejecting the alternative of escape. As she stopped the car and got out Hank and Lucky emerged from the house.
"Any trouble?" Lucky asked, looking at the sand weathered car.
"No. It's already hot though."
"That figures."
They met and paused at the side gate to the yard. Lucky stood looking thoughtfully down at her face, then said in a soft voice that sounded hardly like his own, "Thanks, kid. For coming back."
They waited silently, facing each other, standing very close together. Lucky let the shotgun rest on the butt of the stock on the ground. He held it casually by the barrel. Looking past him she could see John staring angrily out the front screen.
"I ... I'd better go in," she said. "I think I'll take a cold shower. I thought I was going to die in that heat."
She moved abruptly away from him and went up to the front door of the house. John opened it, glaring as she came through. "Why did you come back?" he asked. "Why didn't you get the police?"
"I ..."
"You didn't even try to alert anybody we were here."
"You h-heard what he said," Daria stammered. "It would have just endangered your life, or both our lives."
A resentful grin twisted his lips. "But that wasn't the reason and you know it."
"It was the reason," Daria whimpered, and didn't believe it herself.
She started to move past him and he caught her bare arm, his fingers digging into her tender flesh. "You made it with him, didn't you?"
Daria shook her head, bitting her lips.
"Don't lie to me. Was it good? Hunh? Did he have a great big hard dick? I bet he's like a horse? Hunh? Tell your husband, whore."
Daria jerked her arm suddenly away. "Yes, it was very good. It was better than you will ever be."
Then, tears spilling from her eyes, she pushed past him, fled down the hall to the bath, opened the door and stepped in and locked it behind her.
Sobbing with shame and rage and anger at her husband and herself, the supple-bodied young blonde quickly peeled her sweater up off her head before the lavatory mirror. Still bra-less, she stared at the flawlessly rounded up-thrust swells of her breasts, the nipples perking to rigidity from their contact with the air. She started to undo her skirt, then stiffened as she heard the hard banging on the door.
"Hey, open the goddamn door," she heard John say. She waited, silent, holding her breath. "Open the door you goddamned whore."
"No, John," Daria said in a cracked voice. "I want to be alone."
For a moment he said nothing. Then she heard his deep sigh. "All right, have it your way. Stay alone."
Daria listened to her husband's footsteps as he stalked away down the hall. Well, she thought. That must be the end of that. Certainly after what had happened he would want to get an annulment of their marriage. She wouldn't even blame him. Nor did she think now that she could ever be happy married to him. She couldn't imagine that she'd ever thought she loved him. She had liked him, perhaps. But she had never felt, looking at him, that magic she'd experienced yesterday afternoon when she'd first seen Lucky. She could only conclude that it had been her refusal to have sex, which she now felt would have been the natural consequence of a relationship between her and John or any man like John, that had led to her blowing her natural sexual inclinations up into something they were not.
"Oh, I don't even know," Daria said aloud to herself. "I don't understand it. I just know it's happened."
And it had happened. She was sure of it. She 'd fallen in love. For the first time in her life.
Quickly Daria loosened the snap at the side of her skirt and worked it down off the flare of her hips. She dropped it to the floor and stepped out of it, then quickly peeled her panties down from the firmly molded half-moons of her ass and the inviting triangle of sparse brown hair between her thighs. Again she couldn't resist glancing at her naked body in the mirror, and her awareness of her lusty sexuality only served to recall even more vividly to her mind the delights of the night before. And it seemed that her appetite had only been whetted. She wanted more and more. Right now, she wanted everything.
Daria started the water to run luke-warm in the shower hose, then stepped over the ledge of the bathtub and drew the plastic curtain, relishing the cool feel of it on her goosebumped shoulders and breasts. She let it pour into her face, running in rivulets down over the naked curves of her flesh, then took the soap and began to scrub gently over the sensuously rounded curves of her flesh. Then suddenly she stiffened, hearing a faint stirring sound at the door. She ducked her head through the curtain, staring out wide-eyed. There was a soft clicking, then the handle turned and it opened.
Daria gasped as Lucky stepped through, staring with his intense piercing eyes at the outline of her body through the near-transparency of the shower curtain. In his hand he held an ice-pick, bent slightly on the end, and Daria almost fainted with shock before she realized that he must have used it to pick the lock. Seeming to sense erroneous conclusion to which she'd originally jumped, the bare-chested muscular man pitched the weapon away. Then he grinned, stepped out of his shoes and dropped his trousers to the floor. He reached behind his back to pull the door shut and lock it again. And as Daria gawked open-mouthed at his long limber penis, stirring slowly upward toward rigidity, he pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the shower with her.
"Tell me, kid," he said, grinning down at her flushed, surprised face. "Have you ever had your pussy eaten?"
Eight
Daria didn't know how long she stood in stunned silence after she'd heard that shocking question. Her head was almost reeling and there was a weakness in her legs. They were facing each other, their naked bodies but inches apart, the water cascading over them. Lucky was watching her with a leering grin as she gazed open-mouthed back at him. In spite of everything she'd been unable to contain the unwanted thrill that had rose in her breasts at the sight of him coming through the door. Her body had responded automatically as he'd suddenly stripped naked before her, and the lurid visions which darted through her mind at the sight of that long reptilian penis that had given her such exquisite pleasure the night before were more than she could resist. And then he'd said that, that awful perverse suggestion which could only be taken as a further attempt to debase and shame and humiliate her. And yet with all her sense of personal degradation at being treated so much like a worthless whore she couldn't ignore the lascivious and compelling images the mere suggestion prompted in her mind.
My God, it was just too horrible to believe, and she knew he couldn't be seriously thinking of doing such a thing. Or had he been so warped by prison that he could think of lowering himself and shaming and humiliating her that way? She didn't know. She couldn't guess. She could hardly even think, and she only knew that somehow she had to pull herself together and get back on some kind of even keel. Here just a moment ago in her own wishful inner reverie she was telling herself she was in love with this crude brute of a man who had so ruthlessly taken and used her body. But this wasn't love, not what he was suggesting now. It was depraved and perverse, a warped act of lust and sexual deviation.
"Well?" Lucky asked, reaching up to lay his hand gently on the side of her damp cheek.
"Well ... what?" Daria gasped, her whole body jerking as Lucky's distending and blue veined penis prodded up suddenly against her naked inner thighs.
"Have you ever had your pussy eaten?"
"Oh my God! Nooooooo!" Daria whimpered.
He was grinning at her in lewd amusement, reaching down to take his cock in his hand, stroking lewdly up and down its massive, still increasing length. It was almost fully hard in spite of the cold water pouring over their bodies, pulsing with almost visible urgency, surrounded at the base by a thick matting of wetted, dark brown curly hair. Then he removed his hand from his cock, reaching out to wrap it I around her body, pulling her too him to kiss her on the lips. He took the bar of soap from the rack, scrubbing it forcibly into a lather over her rigidly nipple-peaked breasts, down over the tingling smooth skin of her belly, on down into the soft almost blond strands of the hair of her cunt.
"Oooooh please noooooo!" Daria moaned without conviction as she felt the soap bar lather up between her thighs over the tingling bud of her clitoris and the softly hair-lined lips of her cunt. She didn't know when she'd ever experienced anything so weirdly exciting. It was an action she'd performed countless times herself, and more often than once she'd allowed herself to enjoy a certain amount of sexual titillation from this act of personal hygiene. But that had felt nothing like this. Lucky was scrubbing the soap bar back and forth in a rhythmic little motion along the passion sizzling lips of her cunt and the sensation she derived from it was almost driving her out of her mind.
Then Daria's nakedly glistening body jerked in little spasms of bizarre delight as he scrubbed farther back between her thighs, right across the sensitive membrane at the bottom of her pulsating little cunt-slit and up between her buttocks to press right on the tingling tightly puckered hole of her anus.
Good Lord, what was he doing down there anyway? Daria thought she was going to scream aloud from the teasing sensation, and the smirking grin on Lucky's face only added to her discomfort and masochistic stimulation. Then he moved his other hand back up to again caress over her naked, tightened breasts, and a moment later he replaced the soap in its rack and began splashing water from the shower up between her legs to rinse her pussy. Again his hand found contact with her now eagerly inflamed vaginal lips, his fingers stroking and prodding at the sensuously receptive flesh with a maddening effect.
Then he dropped down to a sitting position on the edge of the tub, placing him right at eye level with her lower belly. Suddenly she remembered what he'd threatened to do to her. And now she knew that he wasn't kidding.
"Oh noooooooo!" Daria whimpered anew. She tried to jump back but Lucky was too quick for her, he reached up around her to seize her nakedly clenching buttocks and pull her lower body forward toward his face, his hands slipping down below the clefts of her ass-cheeks and in between her thighs, the hard pressure of his thumbs up into the tender flesh causing her to automatically to spread her feet wider apart on the bottom of the tub and allow him even greater access to the softly-haired plane of her cunt.
The humiliated blonde stared down in awe and dismay as Lucky leaned his face closer to her lower abdomen, his eyes gleaming bright with passion and desire as he used his fingers to part the lips of her cringing little pussy.
"Nooooooo," Daria moaned weakly, shaking her head from side to side as Lucky leaned closer to her. "Please don't do it to me."
"Shhhhhhhh," he said with a grin. "Don't want your husband to hear you talking like that."
Daria could have screamed. It was really going to happen and she knew there was no escape. He had her exactly where he wanted her. With the wide-spread position of her feet on the bottom of the bathtub she could hardly even move for fear she would slip and fall, and with his arms locked around her buttocks she couldn't even draw back in retreat.
The distraught, aroused young blonde shut her eyes, an uncontrollable tremor of excitement rippling through her belly at the touch of Lucky's fingers on the raging lips of her cunt. Then suddenly he jabbed his thumbs hard into her soft inner thighs to force her legs out even wider, leaving the lewdly pulsing slit of her cunt completely open to his view. Daria opened her eyes again and she stared down in horror between the quivering mounds of her breasts as his tongue flicked from his mouth to moisten his lips in anticipation of the cruel lashing it was about to inflict on her helpless genitals.
Then his fingers again found the flanged lips of her cunt and with a slow outward motion he drew them completely open until the moist gently pulsing inner orifice was completely exposed to his gaze. A low animal groan of lust rose in his throat, and he turned his head slightly to the side, bending lower so he stared upward beneath her thighs, and without further hesitation his tongue shot from his mouth to bury its whole limberly teasing length straight up into her wide-spread little pussy opening.
"Oooooouuuuuuuuuu!" Daria cried out in spite of the presence of her husband somewhere in the house. Never had she felt anything like the shock of unwanted pleasure that purled completely beyond all control out over her tingling flesh, and she stared down almost in delirium at the sight of Lucky's head pressed against her naked stomach.
But she knew any further protest would be to no avail. Physically she was no match for him and she was already well enough acquainted with him to know that if there was something he wanted from her he was going to take it whether she gave freely or not. But this further act of debasement seemed to be even more than she deserved, and she felt compelled to try to cling to at least a thread of self-respect. If she gave in and responded to this piece of perversity then there would be no hope of ever gaining redemption, and in spite of the tremors of excitement exuding relentlessly out through her naked flesh she vowed that this time she would not be conquered. She would give him her body to perform whatever warped depravity struck his fancy. But she would not surrender up her spirit.
"Oh God," Daria sighed, resolved to fight the titillating sensations building treacherously through her naked and swaying body. It felt like her nerve-ends were exploding in tiny bursts of fiery desire and she was finding it less and less easy to remind herself that she was being forced into cooperation. In spite of all her mental resolve something else was happening physically. Her muscles were beginning to relax into a soft receptivity from the continued sucking and licking on her lust-hungry little cunt. Lucky had drawn the delicately tingling folds of her vagina deep into his mouth, and a long low sigh escaped from her throat in spite of all her efforts to contain it.
The aroused fugitive smiled in lewd self-satisfaction and pressed his face hard against Daria's pubis, nibbling at the quivering bud of her clitoris until her hips began a slow spontaneous undulating movement and soft mewling animal sounds issued from between her tightly gritted teeth. Her gasps and whimpers of pleasure echoed against the background noise of the shower still pouring full-force over her shoulders and neck. Her vaginal passage began to expand and contract, clenching tightly to the slavering tongue searching deeper and deeper up into her tingling inner flesh. Her breath exploded in quick small gusts from the rawly titillating sensations as Lucky continued to curl and flick his tongue all along her trembling hair-lined pussy slit, his nose rutting her clitoris to prompt repeated involuntary jerks of her naked ass-cheeks.
Lucky grunted down between Daria's thighs, his tongue thrusting insatiably in and out of her hotly responding cunt, plunging again and again to make a soft wet sluicing noise with each of its limber penetrations. His face dove deeper into the warm moist crevice between her thighs and his lips sucked and teased hungrily at the little bud of her clitoris, tantalizing her with the sharpness of his teeth as she writhed and churned to shove her buttocks up and down in a lewd dance of aroused desire and want. And as her hands moved finally down to grasp his hair and pull his face tight against her belly and thighs, he chuckled aloud in obscene triumph straight into the flowering opening of her lust-dilated cunt.
"Oooooooh my God that feels good!" Daria whimpered from the continued raw and teasing sensation. Now she was really starting to shed her inhibitions, grasping Lucky's head with both her hands and squatting slightly to further spread her thighs and press his mouth directly over the tight little hole of her desire-heated cunt. Her inflamed vaginal lips parted wider and the flow of her feminine moisture increased by the second as his hungrily sucking mouth continued to work at her aroused pussy crevice. The fragrant slick wetness of her passion mingled with the water from the shower to run in narrow trickles down the sides of his cheeks.
The lustfully excited young blonde could never have dreamed of the existence of such an utterly debauched way of gaining pleasure as that in which she now so willingly partook. The illicit and adulterous eating and sucking her pussy was almost more than she could bear and she ground her lushly undulating buttocks in a pounding back and forth rhythm to the fervent lashing of Lucky's tongue up into her spasming loins. She knew that what she was allowing him to do to her was wrong and depraved. She knew that even beyond the betrayal of her faith to her young cuckolded husband the perverted act in which she was now willingly indulging was an a front to the most common and simple precepts of human dignity and decency. And yet the sordid wickedness of it all only seemed to further intensify her excitement. The sensuous thrills racing through her naked body had taken control of her thoughts and her head was spinning in a whirlpool of savage and obliterating delight.
"Ooooooohhhh yessssssss!" she moaned in final outright surrender. "Eat me. Eat my cunt!" In the self-debasement of her vocal pleadings she let herself go completely as Lucky's wetly seething tongue continued to bore into the now almost gaping passage of her cunt. It was pure ecstasy and she found herself longing for more and more of whatever he had to offer. She knew in the back of her mind even now that she had cast her lot with the temporal rather than the steadfast. Her time with Lucky would be brief, then he would be gone-either to freedom in Mexico or back to prison or to another place even further away, unknown, beyond that fearful veil we will all cross, and will cross only once in our lives, never to return. But she reasoned that one week or one day or one hour with a man who could make her feel like this was better than a lifetime with a man who couldn't. And she was getting everything she wanted and more. Lucky's tongue was working at a feverish pitch, driving her squirming buttocks to movements of even greater frenzy beneath each thrilling stab into her inflamed cuntal tightness.
Then suddenly before she could even realize what was happening Lucky drew his head back from her belly and, using his hands on her buttocks and inner thighs to guide her, he forced her to half turn away from him so he was presented with the nakedly clenching cheeks of her ass. One of his hands moved up her spine almost to her neck, pushing forward so she was forced to bend over and use her arm to balance herself on the faucet at the end of the bathtub, the humiliating position causing her buttocks to part in obscene revelation of the little brown puckered hole of her anus and the now inverted triangle of her soft-haired little pussy from behind.
"Ooooooooh!" Daria groaned in embarrassment at being forced to assume this even more humiliating posture and frustration at the temporary cessation of the maddening oral stimulation of her cunt. "W-what are you doing?"
Lucky answered with action rather than words. As she stared back at him in shame and trepidation she saw his leering face press suddenly forward right into the open crack of her ass from behind. She sighed as she felt his tongue again flick forth to lick up the pulsing little slit of her cunt; then she blinked in astonishment as it continued right over the sensitive membrane to dart full up against the tiny puckered hole of her anus.
Daria stared backward in unwilling delight as the convict's tongue darted again and again into the clenched entrance of the sensitively cringing little aperture, striking it like a snake striking forbidden fruit, its whole limber searing length flickering right into the tight opening with a sharply slicing force.
"Ooooowwweeeee!" The maddening contact with her sensationally stimulated asshole was sending electric shivers to course swiftly over Daria's whole jerking body. The lurid vision of what he was doing to her slashed through her brain like the shock wave from an erupting volcano. His slavering tongue forced its way straight up into the restricting passage of her weirdly titillated rectum and her sensuous body shook in an uncontrolled spasm before the overpowering oral-anal assault.
Never had she experienced such a strange and sensual physical pleasure in her life and the lewd licking of her asshole continued until her screams of submission reached a pitch of delirium. Then suddenly he released the pressure of his hand against her upper back, pulling his tongue out of her anus with a pop, drawing his face completely back from out of the suffocating tightness of the crack of her ass and inner thighs.
"Oh! What's wrong?" the blonde gasped, the stabbing frustration almost causing her to cry out for him to resume the humiliating assault.
"Out of the bath," Lucky said, reaching up to turn the water off.
"Why'd you stop?" Daria gasped, turning around and reaching out with her hands to try to pull Lucky's face back toward her loins.
"We're not stopping, kid. Get down on the floor, on the bath mat."
"Oh! Yes!" Daria hissed with building relish, stepping quickly out of the tub and reclining onto her back onto the soft fluffy mat, waiting in an almost spread-eagled position as Lucky stood up and gazed with triumph down at her glistening naked flesh, completely surrendered and open, his to do with as he wished.
Then her face contorted in shocked disbelief as he dropped down suddenly to his all-fours above her, assuming the reversed position so his face was again over her squirming naked loins and his knees were planted on either side of her face, his rock-hard penis now aimed straight down at her mouth. She blanched at the first inkling of this new and even more depraved deviation, and whatever doubt she might have possessed was quickly erased as he said in a hoarse strained voice:
"Now, suck it."
Nine
Daria was helplessly pinioned on the bathroom floor. Lucky's forearms rested across her thighs, holding them pressed in the wide open-splayed position she'd originally willingly assumed. His knees were locked on either side of her head, maintaining it in place beneath his crotch and the hotly pulsing shaft of his cock. There was nothing she could do to escape and even as her mind rebelled she could feel the continued response and need building urgently through her naked and defenseless loins.
But she couldn't submit to this without some kind of protest. The very thought of it made anything else that had happened previously fade to pale by comparison. But she knew she shouldn't have expected anything else. Lucky had debased and humiliated himself in paying her the ultimate homage of eating her cunt, it was only natural that he should expect an equal homage in return.
Then she gasped as she saw one of his hands reached down beneath his body to seize the hard-pulsing shaft of flesh, bending it downward from his hairy naked belly to aim it even more directly at her face. "Now suck it," he repeated, dropping his pelvis toward the floor and without the slightest warning lowering his own face simultaneously back between her thighs to plunge his searing tongue suddenly straight back up into the most exquisite and sensitive depths of her eagerly accepting young cunt.
The unfaithful bride's brain was a jumble of salacious and erotic images as the devastating oral contact was resumed over her throbbing little cunt. God, it was so wonderful she felt almost that she would be happy to give Lucky anything he wanted in return. But her pleasure was tempered by the awesome and threatening phallus aimed down toward her mouth, and as Lucky dropped his loins even closer to her face, she closed her mouth and gritted her teeth tightly shut in defense. A little choked moan rose in her throat and her ears even as she resisted the blunt, thick cudgel of his cock pressing against her mouth. She could feel it's hard rubberyness almost bruising her lips and she caught the sharp bitter taste of the drop of seminal fluid that had eased from the glans at the tip.
For several seconds the excited convict continued to shove his surging cock-head against Daria's mouth, tightly closed as if she suffered from terminal lockjaw. Then in a sudden fit of anger he fastened his teeth on the protruding little nipple of her clitoris, bitting down suddenly hard.
"Oouuuwwwweeee!" Daria screamed from the sudden sharp stab on the sensitive little nub-end of flesh. In yelling she opened her mouth wide. Then she realized she'd been tricked as Lucky's cock suddenly plunged between her lips and teeth, down the length of her tongue to embed itself far into the back of her throat.
"Gulp," Daria gurgled, almost gagging from the pressure against her pallet and tonsils. She fought instinctively against the stifling effect, closing her jaws tightly around the bloated hardness, clamping her teeth down hard as the relentless pressure continued. She licked and worked her tongue defensively around in her mouth, jerking her head back to leave long white marks on the surface of the huge cock-shaft as her teeth scratched the blood away from the skin.
But beyond the momentary physical discomfort and a lingering prudish instinct that commanded her to rebel on a psychological level, it wasn't all that bad. She found she was becoming accustomed to the foreign presence in her mouth and, coupled with the maddening sensations of Lucky's lips and tongue working slavishly over her cunt, the suggestion the invading phallus provoked in her mind seemed to only intensify her perversely building excitement.
Then as she began her first cautious sucking efforts on the hard male rigidity Lucky drew it slowly upward, pulling the head back up the length of her tongue and out between her teeth, letting it slip from her lips so she raised her head up from the bath mat to follow, like a donkey following a carrot, and at last she reached up with her own hand and seized the palpitating hardness to guide it again toward her lips. Then she flicked her tongue hesitantly from her mouth, searching over the purplish head until she found the slitted glans at the tip and flicked up another drop of the tangy tasting seminal fluid that had seeped forth from the tiny little slit.
At that renewed contact the massive phallus of flesh seemed to jerk to an even greater hardness, flexing and trembling in her hand as if it were a living gun. Holding tightly to it, Daria, thought she could sense in it a kind of deadly animal danger. She was beginning to relish her venture into the unknown world of depravity with a gusto she could hardly believe, and as Lucky continued his exquisite oral ministrations over her quivering loins she vowed that she would give him everything he wanted in return. She would suck him as long as required to give him the kind of satisfaction she could feel building already through her raging cunt and throbbing little clitoris.
The writhing pinioned blonde let the spasms in her belly continue to grow and flourish as Lucky's greedily slavering tongue swirled in and out of her sucking vaginal furrow. She worked her own tongue slowly over and around the blood-filled cock-head, wetting and slickening it with her freely flowing saliva as if it were an all-day sucker. She lashed her tongue in velvety submission around the jerking and palpitating tip, savoring mischievous experimentation and discovery, working gradually lower down the underside of the turgid rod of flesh until again she opened and ovaled her lips to take the swollen head between them.
Again Lucky surged ahead, pushing his cock again almost its full length into her mouth. But this time rather than trying to resist she accepted it greedily, relishing the choking sensation in her throat as she determined to do whatever was necessary to push Lucky beyond the brink of his incredible self-control. And all the while his face was still shoved eagerly down between her thighs, the continued slurping and slavering of his tongue driving her every moment nearer climax. Her buttocks were twisting and jerking in a wild undulation rhythm up from the bathroom floor. Her sucking of his cock was becoming every moment more submissive and fervent, her efforts only prompting him to stab his tongue deeper and more swiftly into her tight little pussy and work his hips with greater force until he was fucking almost ruthlessly into her violated mouth.
Daria's lips were lushly tensiled, grotesquely stretched and distended by the giant presence of Lucky's cock ramming brutally in and out of the hungry warmth of her mouth. She could sense him building toward a peak of frenzy and she sucked it almost with a vengeance. She was giving herself to him body and soul and they were both drawing dangerously near to their climaxes. Every muscle and every nerve of her quivering body had become hyper sensitive and she was almost overwhelmed by the fantastic surges of sensation and eroticism whipping through her breasts and belly and loins.
Then suddenly Lucky growled right down into the spasming depths of her cunt and a moment later his cum bloated balls gave way. He rammed his penis again to the hilt, the nub-end buttock and twitching hard against her tonsils as her mouth closed again tightly around the hard thick shaft and her hands groped and clawed at his churning buttocks as though she would take him even deeper. His sperm came surging furiously up the length of his jerking rigidity and blasted out from the flaring tip like a shot from a gun, pelting into her throat in drop after drop of white hot gushing liquid.
Daria gurgled submissively, swallowing to keep from choking as the pungently heated fluids squirted in a gushing flood from the massively violating hardness. At the same time her own body was undergoing a series of excruciating and devastating spasms as the ripples of pleasure soared out from her clitoris and vagina in a current of shattering human bliss. She lapped with servile acceptance at the spewing and jerking cock-head, gobbling down every available drop of the hot thick spurting sperm.
The fury of their perfectly simultaneous climaxes seemed to go on forever. Daria's pussy was sucking and contracting ceaselessly around Lucky's still wantonly slavering tongue and his own wildly pumping jism filled her mouth and spilled slickly down her lips. Then at last the obscene ejaculations ceased and a moment later her vagina underwent one last little spasm and she sank motionless beneath him on the bath mat. His penis slipped from her mouth, attached still to her lips by a thin web-like strand of viscous liquid. He raised up from between her thighs, shifting about and stretching out beside her on the floor. Eagerly she snuggled into his arms, kissing him hungrily on the lips and relishing the strange coppery-scented taste of her own cunt-juices mixed with his saliva.
Then she drew her head back, beaming at his face. She was about to tell him how she felt when she heard the discharge of the shotgun somewhere outside the house.
Ten
When Daria reached the back door of the house, naked except for the long bath towel she'd draped over her lush still damply glistening body, she sighed with relief at the sight of John, his arms raised above his head, standing about a hundred feet past the back fence, next to a cactus which had been decapitated by a shotgun blast. Hank was standing ten or twelve paces away, the gun leveled toward him. Lucky, who'd left the bathroom at a run with his trousers in his hand but had apparently put them on along the way, was walking shirtless and barefoot toward Daria's husband and the older convict. Daria herself hesitated for a moment, then hurried after him out the back gate, stepping-light footed on the hot, sun-baked sand.
She caught Lucky still some distance short of the other two men. She'd carefully entwined the towel around her body so it covered all but the upper portions of her breasts and extended down an almost modest length below her thighs, tucked in tightly beneath her arms. Lucky glanced at her briefly and touched his hand lightly to her shoulder in a gesture of friendly affection. She smiled, then turned to face her husband's wounded glare.
"What happened?" Lucky asked as they moved up beside Hank.
"I had to get under the car," Hank said. "He made a dash for it. Guess he figured he could make it out of range. I fired a warning shot to let him know he wasn't out of range and I guess he got the point."
Daria looked at the shredded top of the cactus, a little shiver running down her spine as she tried to imagine what John would have looked like if it had been him instead of the cactus who had been hit by the shotgun blast. Then she winced slightly at the implication of her having had that thought. My God, she was really getting warped. She was getting downright gruesome. And yet she found something almost morbidly funny about her own ironic downfall, and as she continued to dwell on the matter she couldn't suppress the wicked grin that crept across her lips.
"Guess you think this is all funny, hunh?" John asked suddenly, lowering his hands toward his side.
"Hands up goddamn it or I'll blow your fucking head off," Hank said, gesturing menacingly with the shotgun.
John raised his hands again, jerking slightly as the gun was brandished in his direction. Then he scowled. "Still don't see why I've got to keep my hands up. I haven't got a gun. What're you afraid of, that I'll draw my prick on you or something?"
Daria giggled in spite of all her efforts to restrain herself, then raised her hand to cover her mouth and tried to assume a straight-faced expression.
"He's got a point hasn't he?" Hank said, looking for leadership to Lucky.
Lucky scratched his chin. "Yeah, you can put your hands down." John lowered his hands. "Why'd you try to run away like that anyway?"
"Why'd I try to run away?"
"Yeah. I mean, don't you realize if you'd run away and left your wife here you'd just be makin' all kinds of trouble for her and us and everybody?"
"Well ... "
"And didn't you ever think of what 'uz gonna happen to you if you didn't make it? I mean, how we'd have to at least keep you uh ... tied up some place and maybe gagged an' all until we made it to Mexico?"
Daria giggled again. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Hank smile at her.
"An' maybe ... maybe how to discourage any other stupid ass stunts we'd uh ... " Lucky paused, thoughtful, then said: "Take your pants off?"
John's face blanched in the blistering sun. "What?"
"Drop your trousers Buster, right now."
Daria giggled. Her husband's eyes flashed on her again, eyes hurt, full of shame and a kind of adolescent seeming fear. She had her hand over her mouth and she was trying everything she could do to hold it back and still the little laughs were coming, shaking her shoulders, causing her naked breasts to jiggle visibly beneath the covering towel. My God, I'm evil and sadistic, she thought, noting out of the corner that Lucky was watching her with obvious pleasure.
Then John shook his head. "I'm not going to do it."
"Yes you are. Hank, I'm gonna count to five. Then shoot him."
Daria's laughter stopped.
John swallowed hard, looking searchingly from one man to the other and back again, back and forth between them.
"That's right," said Lucky. "One! Two! Three! Four!"
"All right!" John blurted, his hand suddenly moving to undo his belt.
"Shoes too," said Lucky.
John nodded, balancing himself awkwardly on first one leg and then the other as he lifted his feet and removed his loafers. Then he undid the buckle and dropped his trousers, standing shame-faced before them.
"Git 'em on off," said Lucky. "Shorts too."
"The shorts." It sounded a dead remark. John worked his feet free from his trousers and stared sheepishly at the ground as he pulled his jocky shorts down. Again Daria giggled at the sight of his penis, now shrunk to a fraction of its normal size. "All right," he said finally, raising his eyes in an expression of utter defeat.
"Get your trousers and bring 'em on," said Lucky, suppressing any sign of humor from his own voice. "We'll see if we can find a comfortable place to tie you."
"Tie me?"
"Hell yes."
John before them, his buttocks white in the sun beneath the tails of his shirt, they marched back to the house. Daria now had almost contained her laughter and she was trying to fathom in her mind what could have gotten in her to make her act the way she had the last twenty-four hours. She was at the point concluding it was an automatic escape mechanism of the subconscious that inspired her perverse and untimely mirth when she was interrupted from her thoughts by Lucky's voice asking Hank how work was coming on the car. Hank said there were a couple of problems, but that he'd have everything fixed in a couple of hours. Then she experienced an acute stab of disappointment as Lucky said:
"Then we'll get on the road tonight. Be better off traveling after dark."
"Don't figure there'll be roadblocks?"
"Hell I dunno. They didn't say anything on the news."
John went through the gate, tugging his shirt tails down in an effort to cover his buttocks, then paused at the back door of the house. Lucky told him to open it and go in when they came up to him. He did so and they followed him down the hall to the den. Using the pistol, which he'd extracted from his pocket, as a prod, Lucky ushered him through, and paused, gazing around the room.
Then he motioned John over to the rocking chair and ordered him to sit down. Leaving Hank to guard the embarrassed half naked man, he went out to the garage and returned shortly with a length of what appeared to be parachute cord. As John whined in protest he ordered him to extend his arms downward along the two back legs of the rockers, then stooped and securely bound his wrists, then stepped back and surveyed his work.
"Well, guess that'll hold him about as well as anything." He shook his head, "Sure hate to have to do that to a man, many times as I had it done to me up at that goddamn place we called home for so many years."
"Well if you hate to do it why don't you cut me loose," John pleaded.
Lucky stared at him silently for a moment, rocking slightly in the chair his cock dangling from his hairy pubis and distended slightly longer than the dwarfed state in which it had first been revealed. Daria looked back and forth, from her lover to her bound husband, back to her lover. "Cause I don't want to go back there. Come on, Hank, let's get to work on that car."
Without another word Lucky and the other armed man walked, bearing their weapons, out of the room and back down the hall. Daria stood where she was, still clad in the towel tucked securely in around her breasts. She raised her hand and sucked absently on her thumb, studying her husband's bitter, wounded face, her gaze descending pensively down to his exposed, restlessly stirring penis. After a moment she walked several steps closer to him, swaying slightly on her feet, conscious of his angry eyes coursing over the teasingly outlined curves of her body, naked beneath the bath towel.
"You're on their side now, aren't you?" he said sulkily.
She shrugged. "Well, if you mean to say I don't want to see Lucky and Hank go back to that awful penitentiary. Yes, I'm for them."
"You were making it with him again this morning when I tried to break for it, weren't you? He came running out of the house pulling on his pants."
Daria bit her lip. Again she felt an inclination to laugh and she hoped the pain would stifle it. God, she did not know how she could have become so cruel and heartless. She thought now that perhaps she'd always been cruel, though previously it had manifested itself in another form. Perhaps that year she'd spent going out with John, often teasing him to a peak of sexual frenzy and then refusing to let him have what he wanted, had been just another form of the same cruelty that allowed her to take perverse delight in his present emotional agony.
"You were, weren't you?" he coaxed bitterly.
"Well ... " Suddenly she smiled. "We weren't exactly making it. Not the way me I and you did night before last. We were do ... something else."
"All right," he said, casting his eyes gloomily toward the floor. "I don't want to hear about it. I don't know why I care what you do now, but I still don't want to hear about it."
"I can understand that," Daria said seriously.
He looked up. "Untie my hands."
"No. I can't."
"Just untie me and let me ... "
"No."
"Let me touch you."
"What?" Daria gasped, blinking.
"I want to ... to fuck you one more time. Wouldn't you like that?" He was studying her thoughtful face, eagerly. "You can't be I getting enough from that ... con. Untie me and let me have some too while ... while they're working on the car."
"I can't," Daria said after a moment of thought. "I can't untie you. But ... John, I mean this. The worst mistake I ever made except maybe marrying you was holding out on you all that time. An I would like to do it with you now. I guess I really am a whore. I guess I always have been deep down inside. But I would really like to do it with you again, right now. Just for the fun of it."
"Then untie me."
"No. We can try to do it in the chair if you want to but I can't untie you. I can't jeopardize Hank and Lucky's freedom just to gratify my own ... needs."
"You fucking slut!" he hissed, setting the rocker into a rocking motion. "I wouldn't touch you, you cunt. I wouldn't touch you if you were the last woman on earth."
Daria smiled. "Is that true?"
Then, as John's eyes bugged, she parted the lower half of the towel off her naked blonde-fringed cunt. She stepped forward, reaching down with her hand to clasp it gently around the still limber shaft of his cock, feeling it begin almost instantly to grow in her hand. She stroked it quickly to an almost full erection as John struggled futility against his bonds. Then she stepped back and let the towel fall back in place over her loins and stared down in smiling triumph.
"See?" she said. "You would touch me. You would love to touch me. But I don't see how we could really do it very well in that chair because the arms would get in the way. And I can't turn you lose. I'm going to go make some sandwiches for the men and have my morning coffee. I'll see you a little later."
* * *
Daria had unpacked her bikini from her suitcase and spent the hottest hours of the afternoon sunbathing her already golden-tanned body in the back yard. Once she'd opened her eyes and found Hank standing at the corner, staring at her. The car had taken longer than he'd anticipated, and he had informed her they were still working on it and then, hand toying at his trousers crotch to arrange his bulging cock in his pants, he'd moved away out of sight.
When she could no longer stand the sun she'd gone and watched the men work for a while, then gone back into the house and made herself a drink. She sat in her bikini, drinking, as John, his lower body now covered beneath the towel she'd been wearing that morning, sat glowering and rocking.
She was on her fourth gin and tonic when the two sweating men came in.
"Well," Luke announced. "She'll make it to the border." He looked out the window at the fading light. "What a day's work! Let's have some grub. Then it'll be dark enough we can get on the road."
Daria hesitated but a moment, then quickly drank down the rest of her drink for courage and said what she'd been thinking about for most of the afternoon: "Lucky? What if we stayed here one more night, I mean, me and you together? It seems like we're pretty safe here and by then the police might have started getting their minds on other things. I ... I want to be with you ... for the night ... before you go ... in case something happens."
Daria saw the red flush over John's face and again she wondered how she could be so cruel. She saw the sharpening in Lucky's eyes, the pensive gleam in Hank's. She could feel her own heart pounding frenziedly in her bikini clad breasts. Then it seemed to sink as Lucky shook his head.
"I'd like to, Babe. But we can't. It ain't fair ... to Hank or ... even to Buster there."
Hank's lips seemed to quiver and his eyes were hungrily roving over Daria's teasingly revealed body. Then suddenly he leaned over and whispered something in Lucky's ear. There was a silence over the room as Lucky thought it over, then ventured to Daria in a slow paced voice:
"Hank says he'd be willing to take the chance if ... well, you know Hank spent seven years in the joint ... he still hasn't ... ."
Daria could feel the pounding of her heart and she thought her voice would falter as she answered: "I understand. It wouldn't be fair to ... " She hesitated, looking at Hank's eager, embarrassed face. "To leave Hank out," she said doggedly. "Would that bother you, Lucky. If I ... if Hank."
"Jesus!" John exclaimed from his place in the rocking chair.
Lucky smacked his lips and paced around in a little circle and looked up at Daria and then managed a crazy-looking kind of smile. "Hell, I ain't got no right to be bothered. An' if I am bothered, I'll get over it."
Daria sighed, her mind reeling with this new and even more shocking turn of events. Then, out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed her dazed looking husband. She took a deep breath, rallying her courage. "And John? After all he is my husband."
Lucky nodded with a grin. "Yeah Buster. Count yourself in, too. We're gonna have a party."
Eleven
Daria had really passed the limits of even her wildest and most secret fantasies. Through the time she spent preparing the men and evening meal, the mingled excitement and dread that consumed her consciousness made it almost impossible for her to think clearly and try to evaluate on a psychological level her motives for getting herself into her present situation. With the air conditioning the house had turned cool at sundown, and she had changed out of her bikini into a sexy black brassiere and lacy matching panties, then slipped into a loosely clinging cotton dress that buttoned down the front. The cooking of the meal, the serving and the eating were like steps of a slow ritual preceding a human sacrifice. There was a building tension in the air. The men ate silently, watching her. She knew they were thinking about what they were going to do to her. She could feel the electric current in the atmosphere, a building tension she thought could have been cut with a knife. She was the sacrifice. In that moment of drunken over-emotion she had given her body up to them. She knew now that it would be impossible for her to retract the offer.
Outside the window the sky had turned dark. Daria rose and cleared the plates off the T.V. dinner serving tables on which she'd served the meal in the den. Her eyes met the eyes of each of the men: Hank beaming with almost childish innocence, looking over her supple lush body again as though she were the first woman he'd ever seen in his life; Lucky now sullen and pensive, perhaps jealous of the fact that his conquest would be shared by his partner, determined, she feared, to take out his hostilities physically on her surrendered body; and John, his right hand now untied so he could feed himself, looking at her with a raw lusting hatred.
She took the plates and walked out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen. She put them into the sink and ran warm water over them, her body trembling at the thought of what was about to happen. She had merely picked at her own meal, and yet the little she had eaten had served to tone down her alcohol high. Now she was beginning to sincerely wonder what she had gotten herself into, and why on earth she'd done it, and she dallied over the dishes much longer than was necessary, trying to postpone her ordeal as long as she could. Again she considered the thought of fleeing. Now the prospect seemed more tempting than it had at any time since her captive sojourn had begun. My God, she couldn't imagine what on earth had come over her to agree to submit to Lucky's grudging and obscene suggestion. It was group-sex, the notorious "gang-bang," as she knew it was referred to in slang, and now the very idea was more than she could face. She just couldn't do it. She couldn't. It would be the betrayal of her last remnant of decency, the undoing even of the strange warped love affair which had first put her on the road to damnation. And if she killed that love, however strange a love it had been, she would have nothing left to cling to in her mind.
Her heart suddenly racing, Daria turned and crept out of the kitchen, continued down the hall to the room where she'd slept beside her passed-out husband that first night after Lucky had fucked her until she couldn't see straight. She went over to the window and stood looking out, then gently raised it and unlatched the screen. Her breath was coming in sharp hoarse gasps, as if she were breathing air too low on oxygen. She was trembling with fear and excitement. She knew she had to go, and yet she couldn't seem to make herself make the move of pushing the screen open and climbing through. She waited, almost paralyzed. Then, hearing the voice behind her she realized she'd waited too long.
"You're not going anywhere."
It was Lucky, standing in the door. Daria turned to face him with frightened, moistened eyes. "Lucky. I ... I can't do it. I don't know what I was thinking about this afternoon. I must have been drunk, but this isn't what I wanted. I wanted just to sleep with you. Just you." She was watching him almost desperately and he merely stood there, looking at her almost without emotion. Her lips quivered, then curled into an insane kind of little smile, and suddenly she rushed forward toward him, threw her body against his and wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, squirming her firm voluptuous breasts hard against his chest. "Lucky I love you, don't you understand? I can't do that, not right in front of you I can't let another man have me. You're the one I want and I can ... I can see that you feel ... the same way about me."
"Maybe."
"Oh yes, yes!" she cried, standing on her tiptoes to shower wet little kisses over his face. "I knew it, you feel the same way I do and ... "
"But you ain't holdin' out on Hank, not after you got him all excited."
"What?" Daria stepped back, her hand moving up to her mouth as she stood looking at him with tearful pleading eyes.
"You ain't holdin' out on Hank. Come on."
He took her wrist, his strong hand almost crushing her bones as he led her out of the room and back down the hall, walking swiftly and half-pulling, half-dragging her along behind him like a naughty child being led to a thrashing.
"No Lucky, please no, I can't, I can't," Daria protested in a cracking voice, but all her pleas were to no avail and he jerked her into the room, flinging her by the arm so she went stumbling through the door, almost fell and finally just managed to regain her balance and stand, in the center of the room, looking wild-eyed at the two waiting men.
Hank was standing by the liquor cabinet, a tall glass of gin and tonic in his hand, that same childish excitement reddening his sunburned face. Then her eyes strayed to John, rocking slowly in the chair, watching her with a sulking grin. His right hand, she noted, was again tied to the arm of the rocker. The towel still lay across his naked loins, but she could see the stirring erection tenting up beneath it.
"I fixed you a drink," Hank said, stepping forward and holding the glass out toward her.
"John ... " she said in a whisper, absently taking the drink as she stared down at his two bound hands.
"Buster's decided he wants no part of you," Lucky said. "That's his business, but we can't afford to have him pulling some kind of monkey business while we got our minds on something else.
"John?"
"It's your party, baby," he said with a sadistic and gloating smile.
"How we gonna do this?" Hank asked. "Can I go first?"
"That's no fun," John said, still looking smugly at his frightened wife. "She's got enough holes to go around, why don't you both take her at the same time?"
"John!" Daria gasped, quickly draining half the drink and again feeling the rushing effect of the alcohol through her brain.
"That's right," Lucky said, turning to Hank. "You want her cunt or her mouth?"
"Oh no," Daria whimpered, hardly able to believe this wasn't a dream from which she would momentarily awake. "It can't be. It just can't!"
"Oh but it is!" John gloated from his place on the chair.
"That's right."
Daria started at the sound of Lucky's voice just behind her. He took the empty glass from her hand and she turned and looked at him with a desperate pleading. "Oh Lucky, don't make me."
"Strip!"
"No, please ... "
"Strip!"
He stooped and set the glass on the floor. He straightened up, his cold hard eyes boring into hers. Then he reached up to the front of her dress with both hands and jerked. There was a swift ripping sound as the buttons tore loose all the way down to her waist. She was trembling, her heart pounding frantically in her breast, her eyes glazed with the weirdly building masochistic excitement churning already relentlessly through her loins at the thought of what was about to be done to her. He pushed the dress from her shoulders and it fell away from the top half of her body, then slipped from the flare of her hips and dropped to her ankles at the floor. Still watching her with his seething, lusting rage, he reached behind her back and unsnapped the brassiere, working the straps quickly down off her arms so the lacy black cups fell away from her proudly upstanding breasts and she was left naked except for her flimsy little panties in front of the three leering men.
Daria didn't know when she'd felt so vulnerable and ashamed in all her life. Her supple body was trembling and her legs felt weak and wobbly beneath her. She could feel the cool air conditioned air tingling over her goosebumped little nipples, causing them to rise to pert rigidity off the lusttauted swells of her breasts, and she was aware of a slick and discomforting wetness in the crotchband of her panties from the freely flowing moisture that seeped involuntarily from her cunt. Like a prisoner surrounded by sadistic interrogators, she looked around at the three men, the two convicts staring at her with their excitement and lust and John still watching her with his smirking almost self-satisfied smile.
"God Jesus Lord she's beautiful, Lucky," Hank said in a hoarse quivering voice. "See if you can get her to take her panties off. I wanna see her cunt, hunh? Can I see her cunt?"
"The panties," Lucky said tersely.
"Please!" Daria whimpered.
She heard John give out with a short burst of laughter, like an echo of her own laughter when Lucky had made him remove his own trousers after he'd tried to escape.
"The panties," Lucky repeated, and suddenly giving in to the hopelessness of her situation Daria slipped her thumbs into the tight elastic waistband at the top of the flimsy little garment and drew them slowly downward off the flare of her ass-cheeks and the blonde-haired triangle of her cunt, down the length of her slender silken thighs to step out of them and leave them lying uselessly on the floor at her feet. Then she straightened up slowly, looking at Lucky with lust-glazed eyes, and spoke in a soft voice of resignation and surrender:
"There. I'm naked."
Lucky smiled, his eyes roving lustfully over the soft curves of her quivering body as his own hand moved down to unbutton the fly of his white trousers. Behind her Daria could hear a low hissing of breath, but for the moment she stood mesmerized as Lucky withdrew his long, still limber cock from his trousers and gave it a couple of teasing shakes with his hand.
"Suck it," he said, reaching up with one hand to seize Daria's long blonde hair and start to draw her face downward.
Unable to fight against the pain on her scalp, Daria started to drop to her knees. Then Lucky gave a harder yank, forcing her again to straighten up.
"Lucky? What ... ?"
"Bend over and suck it."
"He means leave your ass in the air, honey," John said sarcastically from his place as a sideline observer.
Tears of shame spilling from her eyes, Daria planted her feet squarely on the floor, stiffening her knees and bending at the waist to lower her face again toward his crotch and the distending length of his cock. She was so filled with shame and self-pity she could have died right there on the spot, and her awareness that the humiliating stooped position of her body served to present the two men behind her with a perfect view of her asshole and naked little cunt only intensified her sense of disgrace. But she knew better than to resist. Her only hope was to get through her moment of suffering as quickly and easily as possible, and it was with a tender expertise that she took Lucky's cock in her hand, stroking gently along the growing hardening shaft and drawing the bulbous swollen head almost eagerly up toward her voluptuously parted and ovaled lips.
"Jesus Christ," she heard John gasp, and she was vaguely aware of a rustling of clothing behind her.
Then, as her lips were but inches away from Lucky's purplish swollen cock-head he began to walk backward, leading her in her bent-over position by the pull of his hand on her hair. She could see nothing but the floor and she was only slightly conscious of the shuffling footsteps behind her. Then Lucky dropped to a sitting position in the arm of the couch, forcing her to stoop even lower and further increasing the strain on her neck and back and shoulders, even more ripely proffering her nakedly upturned ass.
"Oooooh!" Daria moaned from the punishing physical discomfort as Lucky jerked her head even lower. She flicked her tongue cautiously from her lips, circling it teasingly over and around the lust-bloated cock-head in anticipation of taking it into her mouth. Then she heard another shuffling sound behind her and the lurid vision of what was really about to happen flashed starkly in her mind even before John called with sadistic glee:
"Watch out from behind, baby, got a surprise coming in from the rear."
Suddenly jerking her face around, Daria stared back in shocked awareness at the sight of Hank, his trousers clutching at his ankles, moving up into position behind her nakedly thrust-up buttocks. And as her eyes came to rest on his pulsing throbbing cock she couldn't contain the cry of terror that rose from her throat.
Oh no, god no, she couldn't take that thing in her cunt! It was enormous. He made even Lucky look like a midget. It was thick and long, thrusting straight up from his hairy belly a good eight or nine inches in length, so enormous she was sure it would rip her apart at the seams.
Suddenly gripped by sheer panic for her physical well-being, Daria started to drop to her knees, at the same time struggling desperately to free her hair from Lucky's grasp. But the older convict seized her from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist to hold her buttocks in their upturned proffered posture even as Lucky took hold of one of her ears to pull her face forcibly lower toward his crotch.
Then before she could make another move to escape or resist Hank shuffled a couple more steps forward and her whole body shuddered from the sudden frightful contact of his massive erection thrusting straight up between her thighs from behind. Her body jerked in automatic response, lunging forward so her mouth ran head on into Lucky's nakedly up-thrust hardness, gulping as it slipped between her lips and teeth and plunged down the length of her tongue to her throat. And as she reflexively drew back in the face of that obscene and unnatural invasion of her mouth, Hank's hands jerked back suddenly hard on her flanks and her whole body contorted from the sudden searing contact of his over-sized cock-head pushing right up against the cringing hair-ringed opening of her cunt.
"MMMMMNNNNN!" Daria moaned, her protestation rendered unintelligible by Lucky's bloated cock thrust deep in her mouth as she swayed weakly in shame and terror before the gigantically blunted cock-head shoving hard at her moistly heated cunt-lips from the rear. Every muscle in her body felt as if it were being stretched beyond endurance and her wide planted feet left her thighs completely open, offering the plane of her pussy up helplessly to the barrel-chested convict mounting her like a bull from the back. There was nothing she could do to escape. Her proffered loins were his to plunder at his will.
Then suddenly Hank lunged forward again, driving the enormous tip of his cock-head up into her unnaturally stretched vaginal aperture. Her buttocks jerked in tremoring spasms and she plunged her stretched and ovaled lips all the way to the base of Lucky's lewdly-inflamed hardness as he continued his mighty, searing lunge, shoving his plundering cock-head deeper and deeper into her burning cunt to push all resistance aside until it was embedded up into her to the hilt.
"Aaaaggghhhhhh!" she managed to cry out in spite of the penis that stuffed her mouth, but there was no respite and even before the two separately tortured orifices of her mouth and cunt could have begun to adjust to the simultaneous abnormal penetrations, the two men began to frenziedly fuck her back and forth from both ends at once. It was too horrible to even tell and they were buffeting her mercilessly as their cocks plunged in swift synchronized motion between her lips and teeth and up into the pain-parted lips of her cunt. In the background she heard as eerie distant echoes of her bound husband's spiteful remarks. The slapping of Hank's loins against her naked upturned buttocks sounded like a Medieval dungeon flagellation. The gulping and gurgling and whimpering noises that poured from her own cock-ravaged throat were no less unreal and no less real. The agony in her cunt was an outrageous burning presence that nearly pushed her into the escape of the unconscious and was matched only by the mental agony of having her mouth and loins used in such a merciless and contemptuous fashion. But there was no escape, no sleep; she remained awake, helplessly pinioned and wedged between the two wildly fucking men until somehow, almost miraculously it seemed, her mind and body began gradually to adjust.
Her pussy muscles stretched beyond all recognition and the unspeakable subjugation of her flesh and spirit began to create a stirring of bizarre masochistic excitement coursing electrically through her loins and flesh. She had played with fire and she was being burnt. But she had wanted it and now she was getting it as she could never have dreamed. She was being fucked in a manner that made anything else to which she'd been subjected these last few days seem like mere child's play, and even if the physical stress resulted in permanent emotional injury she knew she would never escape until she'd gained her own now badly needed release. And now beginning to long for that redeeming factor of physical climax, she cautiously began to rotate her buttocks backward to meet Hank's massively violating forward lunges, at the same time starting to suck and lick in servile doglike submission to the hard-inflamed penis ramming relentlessly into her mouth.
"Oooouuuuuuuummmnn," Daria whimpered as the two men continued to rack and pummel her captive body, driving her helplessly as a rag doll back and forth between them. The debasement of her situation and the obscene of being used this way as a receptacle for all their pent-up lust and fury were taking their toll on her will to resist. The secret masochistic desire stirring through her aching flesh was bursting into full bloom and she began to roll and rotate her back thrust buttocks in teasing luxuriating circles, tightening her cruelly ravished cunt muscles warmly around the cock impaling her from behind and at the same time intensifying her wanton cock-sucking on the hard rod of flesh that plundered into her mouth. She was giving herself up completely now and she was determined to do whatever she had do to satisfy these two sex-obsessed men who were so cruelly using her helpless and naked young body.
And already the end was drawing near. It had been more than seven years since Hank Daily had had a woman and he'd never had one like Daria. He was thrusting into her harder and faster, battering brutally against the cushions of her nakedly squirming ass. At the same time the saliva in her mouth was becoming sticky and thick from the lubrication fluid that seeped from the end of Lucky's cock in anticipation of his swiftly building ejaculation. And her own excitement and lust was moving swiftly past the point of no return.
Then suddenly Daria sensed the cock fucking into her so enormously from behind begin to tense and inflate even thicker and harder. It was flexing like a weight-lifter's muscles far up into her most sensitive vaginal depths. Her thighs were being swept apart as the hairy-chested man drove vengefully into her, shoving his bloated penis as far as it would go up into the lining of her belly as he suddenly began to spew his teeming viscous cum in a shattering torrent into her succulently contracting womb.
Daria rocked back frenziedly as she felt the seething male fluids pouring hotly into her slickening dilated vagina, filling her until she thought she would burst from the pressure of his still rock-hard penis. His staccato slapping of her waggling naked ass-cheeks caused her to bury her face even more hungrily in Lucky's jerking loins, and a moment later she felt his cock twitch to full length into her mouth and explode forth with a volcanic eruption of pungently seething liquid. She swallowed to keep from choking, hollowing her cheeks as her mouth was filled with the fiery gushes of cum. Her lips clasped tight around the lurching cock-shaft and she hungrily gobbled down the torrent of salty-tasting life-giving sperm, all the while continuing to grind and rotate her buttocks in wild and savage undulations as she felt the first warning spasms deep in her loins and her own body burst forth and soared up and exploded in a shattering crescendo of ecstasy and relief.
All three of them were cumming together and their obscene rousing climaxes seemed to go on forever before the two penises that had so ravished her finally began to deflate and retract respectively from her vagina and mouth. Her naked body still twitching with post orgasmic delight, Daria leaned forward against Lucky, wrapping her arms warmly around him and snuggling tight against his chest.
He held her for a moment, then gently disengaged himself, letting her collapse in exhaustion over the arm-rest of the couch. Behind her she was vaguely conscious of Hank muttering alternately words of thanks and exclamations of triumph. She was faintly conscious of John speaking softly to Lucky. For a moment she almost drifted off to sleep still in that vulnerable inviting position, lying on her stomach across the arm-rest so her buttocks were still offered up in ripe proliferation for whoever might have wanted to take advantage.
Then she snapped suddenly back to reality as she felt Lucky shaking her shoulder. "Wake up kid. Buster's changed his mind."
Twelve
Daria turned her head weakly to look around, a gasp springing to her lips at the sight of John standing behind her at the end of the couch, still naked from the waist down, his swollen penis looming up in obscenely pulsing erection from between the tails of his shirt. His eyes were gleaming with a relish of hatred and lust, his teeth gritted, his lips curled back in a smile that resembled the snarl of a dog, and the malice on his face was almost enough to make her blood run cold in her veins.
"Oh, no," Daria gasped, shaking her head in feeble protest. "Not now. I can't take any more now."
"Sure you can. There's got to be a little something left for your husband or what's the fun in having an orgy in the first place."
Daria shivered at the cruelty she perceived in his cracked icy voice, and she planted her arms on the cushions of the couch to start to lever herself up into a standing position. Then suddenly John was upon her from behind, reaching down to seize her wrists and pull them behind her back, pinning them hard against her lower spine as he used his other hand to shove her face down onto the cushion so that with her pelvis resting on the arm of the couch her buttocks were thrust high and helplessly in the air. And as he moved closer there was nothing she could do but wail and kick her feet. She was balanced perfectly on the arm-rest, her wrists crossed helplessly behind her, and there was nothing she could do to resist as she felt John's free hand reach down to part her quivering buttocks, his finger flicking along the bottom of her already ravaged vaginal slit to spread a few droplets of mingled vaginal lubricant and cum back across the sensitively tingling little membrane and over the tightly puckered little hole of her anus.
"Oh no!" Daria gasped, still not even imagining what he really had in mind. "Don't touch me there, John. It hurts!" she cried as she felt the first hard pressure on the clenching little aperture.
Then she blinked as the tight resistance gave way and his finger suddenly slithered straight up into her tightly clasping rectal sheath, burying itself all the way to the knuckle as she kicked and squirmed in pain and humiliation before him. She groaned as he wiggled it deep inside her rectum, then gave out with a hoarse cry when he swiftly withdrew the digit with a burning sucking pop. Thinking she'd been spared, she heaved out a sigh of relief and momentarily ceased the kicking of her feet and relaxed her struggles to free her wrists. Then, before she could grasp what was happening, John pulled her legs wide apart and stepped forward between them to bend over her from behind, and suddenly his finger was replaced by the lust-hardened head of his turgid cock.
"Oh!" the blonde gasped in astonishment and shock. "What are you doing?"
She asked the question, and as she felt John reach down between their bodies to guide the bulbous cock-head directly up toward the already cruelly stretched entrance of her anus it was answered in her mind, and suddenly gripped by a terror beyond anything she'd known since her initial defloration, she again began to jerk and struggle, waving her bare feet uselessly in the air, flailing her head from side to side, pulling with all her might to free her hopelessly pinioned wrists.
"Oh no, John, God noooooooooh!" she wailed in utter disbelief. "Don't do it to me there, please, I can't stand it."
But it was as if he didn't even hear and she was suddenly blinded by the white hot stab of pain as John lunged forward to shove his now monstrous seeming penis even harder against the slavishly clenching little opening of her rectum. The cringing little hole resisted with all its might and he grunted a strained, for a moment completely thwarted. Then Daria gasped as the resistance gave way and as new tears filled her eyes she felt just the head of his cock pop up into the tight elastically clasping opening, working its way slowly deeper as he continued to groan and strain behind her, plundering relentlessly inward, inch by inch toward the shivering depths of her bowels.
"Aaaaggggghhhhhhhh!" Daria cried out, her shrill scream reverberating through the room as the massively stretching cockshaft burrowed relentlessly deeper into her heatedly cringing anus. Pain jolted through her body like an electric shock and all her struggles were futile as John continued to push and ram against her fleeting inner physical resistance until she felt the coarse hair of his loins smack hard against the quaking softness of her upturned naked ass and at last he was embedded into her to the hilt.
"Oh God," Daria whimpered, heaving out a sigh of relief and hurt as she realized that the worst was over. "Why John? Why did you have to do it to me like this?"
"Because I wanted a hole I wasn't going to fall into," her angry cuckolded husband growled from behind, flexing his penis to cause her whole body to jerk in a fearful spasm. She had never felt so soiled and degraded in her life and the thought of having Lucky watch her submit to this after what he'd already seen only made her sorrow that much greater. And John added injury to insult as he began to saw rhythmically in and out of her tiny burning asshole, grunting and groaning with the strain of it as he sank his cock again and again into the unnaturally impaled depths of her rectum.
"Oh God," Daria cried, sobs of pain and misery falling from her lips as John plunged the full length of his penis repeatedly into her fire-seared bowels. But she knew there was nothing she could do but accept her punishment and hope it would be over as soon as possible, and she forced her body to relax, letting her buttocks part easily and her inner muscles stretch and give to make room for the skewering instrument burying itself every moment deeper and deeper into her lacerated little anus.
And to her surprise she realized that the agony she'd initially experienced was fading. The pain was still there, a terrible burning gnawing presence that seemed to exist in the very cosmic center of her being. But she could stand it. She was standing it easily now and already she'd already stood much worse, and in the hope she could do something to hasten the end of her suffering she experimentally tried to flex her ass-cheeks to further increase the friction on her husband's twitching penis. Discovering that effort increased her own sensation but did at least serve to give her the feeling she was at least a participant rather than the completely impassive receptacle of his lascivious action, she went a step further and began to squirm and roll her buttocks on the arm of the couch, further increasing the teasing friction and the maddening pain-pleasure sensations she was beginning to derive from the debasing anal penetration.
Even Daria couldn't believe her lewd response, and she tried to mentally justify her masochistic surrender by telling herself that she was responding only in the hope of driving John to another of his premature climaxes in the hope that her torment would end. She squirmed and jerked, dropping her feet down to stand with her tiptoes on the floor and give herself additional leverage. She flailed her head from side to side, whipping her long blonde hair over the softness of her shoulders. As John released her wrists she planted her elbows on the cushion of the couch, further facilitating the slavish waggling movements of her ass against the skewering penis plowing deeply into her bowels.
But if John had lost control prematurely the night he'd deflowered her, he possessed the control of a yoga mystic now. She thought it must have been his anger and resentment and determination to prove himself that gave him the strength, and yet she realized that after the way she'd betrayed and shamed him these last few days she deserved all the punishment she could get. And if a little suffering on her part could give him back his ego and masculine pride, who was she to withhold it? After all, he was still her husband, and would be until their ill-fated marriage was annulled.
"Oh yes," Daria gasped out in final masochistic surrender as John used both his hands to part her waggling asscheeks and leaned forward as far as he could, impaling even deeper into her lust-seared rectal depths. "Yes, fuck me, fuck me!" she chanted in building delirium, groaning and jerking as her husband buried his cock in her asshole to the hilt and flexed it deeply up inside. Then with long smooth strokes he resumed the lewd pistoning into her quivering anus, ramming against her with smoothly building lunges that racked her body down against the arm of the couch.
Sweat from his labor spilled from his forehead down onto her lovely writhing back and his breath came in sharp deep gasps as she waggled her buttocks urgently back against him, taunting her bowel muscles to further increase the maddening sensation on his rawly plunging cock.
By now Daria felt almost no pain, just an exquisite warm wetness on the crevice of the cheeks of her ass. She was filled as she had never been filled before, but she was enduring it and rising above the suffering she'd undergone, and in a sudden compulsion to further increase her own physical stimulation she reached back with one of her hands around the side of the arm of the couch to stroke up between her thighs from the front and find the cringing little bud of her clitoris. She squeezed and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger, a series of deep and distant chants pouring from her lips as she began a teasing masturbation of her heated and rejuvenated loins. At the same time she strained back even more eagerly against the burgeoning penis that now seemed to throb to even greater size and hardness, stretching the muscles of her mutilated inner anus almost beyond recognition.
"Oh yes, do it to me. Cum in me, John, cum in me!" she cried out in complete abandon as she felt him thrust the full length of his cock up into her rectum with an even mightier lunge, his body jerking from his own building tension as the first hotly squirting droplets of his thick-shooting cum began to pour in a wild gushing torrent into the foremost depths of her ass. At the same time she felt her own clitoris begin to twitch and spasm as suddenly she was overcome by another rousing, completely unexpected feminine orgasm.
Moments later it was over. John withdrew from her ass with a lurid plop, stood up dizzily on his feet as Daria slithered exhaustedly across the arm-rest to sprawl out in panting response on the cushions of the couch. She lay gasping to catch her breath, then rolled over and looked around at the other three men alternately watching her in silence and looking curiously at each other.
Oh my God, she thought. What have I done? How did, I ever do that? And yet in spite of all her shame and remorse, all her fear that now Lucky would hate her as much or even more than her husband, she couldn't deny that it had been wonderful. It had all been wonderful, exquisitely wonderful and exciting and fulfilling as nothing she had ever known in her life.
Then, trembling, she sat up naked on the couch, still looking slowly from one man to the next, Lucky and Hank again clad in their trousers, John still wearing nothing but his shirt. She searched their faces, stony and thoughtful as if they did not quite believe what they'd seen. Then, for some reason she smiled. "Well, we did it."
Hank's eyes suddenly beamed. "Boy we did. Just that right there was enough to make the whole escape worth it to me, no matter what happens to us tomorrow.
Lucky looked at him suddenly, sharply. Now Daria was staring at him. "Lucky, do you hate me now too?" He looked back at her, his brows knitting with thought. "Will you still sleep with me tonight, like we planned, in a bed?"
He shook his head slowly and Daria almost collapsed with the lashing hurt before he walked swiftly forward, lifted her up and held her naked body tightly in his arms, kissing her hungrily and passionately on the lips. Then he released her and turned around. "We're going to Mexico. Now."
Thirteen
Daria drove, with Hank beside her in the front seat. John, hands bound behind his back though Lucky had been generous enough to let him have his trousers back, rode with the other con in the back. Hank had the revolver and Lucky carried the loaded shotgun across his lap.
They streaked south toward Yuma through the desert night. Once they met a state highway patrol car. They passed it without event. Daria felt chills run down her spine as Lucky lay his hand on her shoulder and squeezed with a tender affection.
"Will you take me to Mexico, Lucky?" she asked him once, hours later.
"No. Too dangerous. I'll meet you some place, later. Leave me an address and I'll write."
"Oh, by that time," Daria said without malice or even real hurt, "you'll be surrounded by Mexican girls. You won't need me."
"I'll need you," Hank said, laying his hand on her thigh. "Baby, that was the greatest I ever had in my life."
Daria smiled. "And I bet that was the biggest one I'll ever have."
In the back seat John coughed self-consciously. They drove a few moments in silence. Then he asked: "What about my car?"
"Don't need it. Can't get across the border. We'll have to get out south of Yuma and climb the fence. But thanks for the clothes. And thanks to old Major Engels or English or whatever the hell his name was, for the house and food and booze." He paused. "Tell you what I do need, though. Need money. How you fixed Buster?"
"Yeah, I bet," Lucky said. "Come on, give me your wallet."
"I can't reach it. My hands are tied, remember."
"John," Daria said from the front. "Give him your wallet. Don't be so stingy."
"My goddamn hands are tied!"
Lucky reached into John's back pocket and extracted the wallet and looked through it. "We might be able to use the travelers checks. I'll leave you a fifty to get home on. You can always get this back. And the cash." Daria listened to him count out two hundred and ninety dollars in cash. "You can keep what pocket change you got," he added to her sulking husband.
Through the night they rolled toward the south. On the western horizon the first gray light of dawn was streaked with red, like diluted, running blood. "Goddamn!" Lucky said, watching the changing colors of the incipient dawn. "Thought we could make it before morning and go over in the dark."
"You told me to stay under the limit," Daria said.
"Yeah. Stay under the limit."
"We're going to need gas," she said. "It's reading empty. We'll just make Yuma."
"The border's another twenty or thirty miles. Stop at a station. Can't chance going empty."
The light was still gray as they pulled into Yuma, passed the luxury motels, along the wide boulevards where the signs directing tourists to the old territorial prison reflected with grim irony upon their own situation. "Maybe we ought to stop and visit it," John offered. "You could hide out till night. They'll never come looking for you there."
"All right Buster. I know you oughtta be on television but me I never watch the stuff. There's a station. Pull in."
Daria pulled into the service station, just opened, and a sleepy attendant came to serve them. Lucky ordered two dollars worth of gas. Up the road she watched the creeping white Ford with the red light on the roof. Lucky's hand touched her shoulder and tensed as it pulled into the station and stopped at one of the pumps ahead of them.
"Keep cool," Lucky said, positioning the shotgun so he could use it fast if he had to. The attendant abandoned them and went to check on the state troopers.
They waited, the silence so tense it could have dulled a sharp knife. Daria managed a smile at one of the highway patrolmen who'd gotten out and looked, with any man's normal interest, at her. The attendant finished gashing the patrol car. The trooper paid and got back in and started the engine. Daria heard the back door open and looked around in time to see John sprawling out on the ground.
From that minute on it happened almost too fast. She saw John getting up, saw Hank aiming the pistol, heard Lucky:
"Don't shoot him. And Babe, you hit it!"
For a moment she was too stunned to move. Then she started the engine and, tires squealing, rolled forward past the gawking policemen. In the rear view mirror she saw John stumbling toward their car. She swerved, tires screaming, onto the street, through the red light as the patrol car whirled around before the station and started after them. She heard the sputter, felt the engine miss. It caught, missed again.
"Damn it!" Lucky gasped in the back. "That stupid bastard. I shouldda let Hank blast him."
"We're out of gas!" she cried.
"I know we're out of gas! Pull over!"
She pulled to the curb and watched the patrol car streaking toward them in the mirror. "Lucky, oh God I love you Lucky."
The engine gave out. They were coasting. She squealed to a halt and before she'd even stopped Lucky was out the door, rolling on the ground. She heard the shotgun blast and saw the tire explode, the car swerving up onto the curb and into the storefront window of the Western Auto. Lucky, running low and crouched, came by like a streak. She started to open the door and Hank caught her arm, holding her back, looking at her with sad, grim resignation.
"Don't go out there," he said.
She thought she understood even before she looked back and saw the trooper in his Stetson standing beside the car, aiming with what looked like a deer rifle. She screamed as she heard the discharge. Looking the other way she saw Lucky's body contort. She saw it contort again, as if he'd been hit by something twice his size and weight traveling at supersonic speed, and heard the second discharge an instant later. The third knocked him to the ground.
She sat dazed, shaking. Hank got carefully from the car, his arms in the air. She saw the pistol lying in the seat beside her. Lucky lay in a heap on the street fifty yards ahead. She felt numbed, finished with life and feeling.
The patrolmen came up to Hank, guns trained on him, searched and handcuffed him. Through the window she heard him say, "The girl's on your side. My gun's in the floorboard. I had it on her all the way."
She got out of the car and held up her hands. One of the patrolmen came around, looked at her and frisked her and told her she could put her hands down.
"You murdered him," she said dully. "Why did you murder him? He was running. I'll tell them. I saw it, cold blood."
The cop laughed softly. "Cold blood, Miss? You know who that was?"'
"I knew him," she said. "I knew him better than anyone."
"Luke McClain. We haven't had a gunman like him in this state since Wyatt Earp was sheriff of Tombstone. Seven convictions, Miss. Murder in the first degree."
"Who'd he kill? He was kind."
"He killed police, men like myself. Killed two more of them just last week when he escaped. If it weren't for those goddamn commy legislators in the supreme court those last two boys'd still be alive."
"But he was good," Daria said, walking slowly toward the distant fallen, bullet-torn body.
EPILOGUE
Daria Harper was convicted of aiding and abetting a fugitive of the law and given two years probation. Defense pleaded leniency, portraying her to the judge as an innocent who because of her naivete had been taken in by and used by arch villain "Lucky" Luke McClain. She demonstrated this naivete by protesting that Lucky was never a villain, that he was a kind and gentle man who had been pushed too far, that she still loved him and that she regretted nothing of what she had done. The Judge was convinced and took her naivete into consideration when determining sentence.
Hank Daily was returned to State Penitentiary to continue his sentence, with virtually all hope of an early release abandoned. For his escape he spent thirty days in solitary. He was acquitted on two counts of first degree murder, plead guilty to kidnap and was given an additional ten year sentence to run concurrently with his present sentence for armed robbery.
John Harper had no trouble obtaining an annulment of his marriage.
Lucky McClain was buried at state expense. He'd died at thirty, having spent five years of his life in reformatory and six in adult prisons. The seven policemen he had been convicted of murdering had been killed during a previous escape and flight across the state. Originally he'd been sentenced to death. Legislation had later commuted that sentence to life imprisonment.
