Untamed Lust

by Orrie Hitt

  A package of cigarettes lay beside him on the seat and he helped himself to one. He hadn’t had a cigarette in more than two days and it tasted wonderful, the way a cigarette tastes after a swim. The night before, lying along the river bank, he had been desperate in his need for a smoke.

  He had just thrown the butt away when he saw, coming toward him, a girl wearing yellow shorts and halter. Jet-black hair fell all the way down to her shoulders, framing a sensuous face which would have well suited the cover of a girlie magazine. She was deeply tanned and her legs were long and straight Her shorts rode high and tight on her legs, cutting slightly into her flesh, and the halter rose and fell with each step.

  “You must be waiting for me,” she said, as she opened the door on the driver’s side.

  He watched her get into the car, and he licked his lips with the tip of his tongue. That halter didn’t hide a great deal.

  “If you’re Mrs. Jennings I am,” he said.

  She favored him with a bright smile.

  “My husband says you have to pick up your clothes in town.”

  “Yeah.”

  She started the car and they moved down the road, increasing speed as they neared the fields. He knew he shouldn’t be looking at her legs, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. No wonder the other man had made a pass at her. Any man would if he thought he had the slightest chance of success. She was married to a man who was undoubtedly useless in the bedroom, and if he knew anything about women she was drying up on the vine.

  “I don’t know your name,” she said, as they reached the highway.

  “Eddie.”

  Once they were on the highway she drove faster.

  “You can call me Kitty,” she said, reaching for the cigarettes. “When my husband isn’t around. If he’s around, make it Mrs.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He didn’t say anything more but he didn’t stop looking.

  2

  EDDIE STRETCHED his body, yawned and rolled over on the bed, blinking his eyes open and staring down at the splash of sunlight pouring in upon the faded red carpet. He shook his head and struggled to his feet.

  He walked to the window, not looking down at Joan who had slept beside him, standing big and naked in the daylight and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Outside, the early sun was bright and clear and the surface of Moon Lake lay like a mirror in front of him.

  He stretched his arms over his head and gave a long, luxurious, yawning sigh. He looked at Joan now, and he saw that she was awake. He smiled faintly, remembering how little sleep they had had. She hadn’t reached his room until almost ten, and it had been wild after that, not just a few moments of passion but hours of it.

  “Good morning,” she said, her smile washing over him.

  “Hi.”

  “How about a cigarette?”

  He walked to the dresser and opened a fresh pack. He lit two and carried them over to the bed, sitting down and putting one between her lips.

  “What time do you go to work?”

  “Today is my day off. Remember?”

  He scratched his head. “Yeah. Wednesday. Well, what the hell, I don’t keep everything in my mind.”

  “There was one thing that you didn’t keep in your mind last night.”

  “What was that?”

  She moved over against him, taking one of his hands. “I don’t have to tell you, Eddie. You know. But I don’t care. When I manage to get my divorce, we can get married in no time at all.”

  He got up from the bed and started to dress.

  “You’ll have to be careful about leaving here,” he said. “We don’t want to get into trouble right off the bat.”

  “I don’t think they’d mind. We aren’t hurting anybody.”

  “Just the same.”

  She left the bed and went over to look at herself in the mirror. He examined her body critically and could find nothing wrong with it. He had seen better, but not much better, and not often.

  “What did you think of Kitty Jennings?” she wanted to know suddenly.

  “Not much,” he lied.

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “I guess you could say so.”

  “So is the daughter, Carole. Wait until you see her. She’s got a sensational shape and wonderful blonde hair. She could be a model if she wanted to. I don’t understand how Roger Swingle ever got in with her.”

  He sat down on a straight-backed chair and tied his shoes.

  “Who’s Roger Swingle?”

  “A creep. He goes with Carole, and usually when she’s here he hangs around. Carole is so lovely and he’s so homely. You wouldn’t think they would be a match.”

  “What time is it?” he asked as he got up.

  “Almost seven.”

  “I’d better get up to the house.”

  “And I’m going back to bed.” She smiled at him. “I’m tired, honey. I’m tired, but I feel great.”

  She blew him a kiss as he went out. There were four more rooms on the same floor, but none of them were furnished. The dust lay thick on the unfinished pine boards, dust which had been gathering for years. Joan had told him the night before that if they remained at the estate after they were married, the rooms could be converted into an apartment. He hadn’t thought much of the idea, but he hadn’t said so.

  His breakfast was waiting when he entered the kitchen, bacon and eggs and coffee. There was a strange man sitting at the table.

  “I’m Clark Wilson,” he said as Eddie sat down. “The caretaker.”

  “Glad to know you.”

  “Hope you make out all right on the new job. Anything I can do, just yell.”

  “Thanks.”

  While they ate, they talked. Eddie learned that Wilson was fifty-seven and that his wife had died the year before.

  “I’m just putting in my time until I can retire at sixty-five,” Wilson said. “I’ve got a daughter in Florida, and I can go down there and stay with her.”

  Eddie ate quickly and didn’t stay for a second cup of coffee. Jennings had told him that he started at eight, but he wanted to get going. He had a feeling there would be a lot to do.

  His first stop was the shed where the traps were kept. He examined each one carefully. None of them seemed to have been boiled and Eddie considered this a must. Boiling them in hemlock bows dulled the metal finish and added a natural scent to the traps. Of course, this wasn’t necessary with traps used in water sets — animals couldn’t smell what was under water — but a lot of his sets would be blind ones in game trails through the woods. He found several pairs of gloves but he had trouble getting his huge hands into them. Gloves had to be used at all times in handling traps, to mask the human odor, especially when trying to catch foxes or other intelligent animals.

  After he sorted out the traps, arranging them outside on the grass according to size, he picked up a hatchet and walked toward the woods. It took him only a few minutes to gather enough hemlock bows for his purpose.

  Getting a pot, however, wasn’t so easy. Mary wouldn’t give up anything she had in the kitchen.

  “There’s an old tub down cellar,” she said. “Why don’t you use that?”

  “What about wood? I have to build a fire.”

  “You’ll find that down there, too. There’s a pile of kindling for the fireplace.”

  It took him most of the morning to get organized, building up a fireplace with stones which he carted from the shore of the lake, filling the tub with water, starting a fire and getting the water to boil. It was the better part of an hour before the water began to turn dark from the hemlock, but by noon he was ready to put in the first load of traps.

  He didn’t know what time it was except roughly by the sun, but he wasn’t hungry and he didn’t take time out for lunch. It would take most of the day to boil the traps and he wanted to be ready to go into the woods the next morning. He had a feeling that Jennings was an impatient man and that he would anticipate results almost immediately. This w
as all right as far as raccoons and skunks went, but some of the other animals required advance planning and patience. Anybody could put out two hundred traps in a day, hit or miss, but that didn’t mean they would catch anything. Eddie had often taken as long as an hour to prepare a fox set, and his care had paid off. The last winter he had trapped, he had caught fifty-six foxes in a total of only fifteen sets.

  The sun was hot and fire added to the heat. He stripped to the waist, sweat rolling down his arms and chest as he worked close to the fire and stirred the water with a stick every once in a while. As the traps were finished he hung them on nails he had driven into the side of the shed, handling them with gloves.

  About mid-afternoon he saw Joan leave the garage and walk toward the main house. She waved but she didn’t come over to him, and he was just as well satisfied. He would probably see her again that night and that was soon enough. Maybe, to be honest, too soon. He knew that she was in love with him. When she talked of marriage it gave him the shudders, not because she wouldn’t make a good wife, but because he didn’t feel ready just yet. Getting married meant a home and kids, and an entirely new life. In the past he had drifted from one job to another, never caring about tomorrow, never having the feeling that he should settle down. There had been several girls for him while Joan was married, but none of the affairs had been serious or important. If a girl had refused him, he hadn’t bothered with her again.

  He sweated through the afternoon, feeding wood to the fire, taking traps out of the water and putting others in, feeling completely satisfied with his work. Jennings might think the day had been wasted, but he would be mistaken if he did. When a man set out to trap he had to do it right, or he was wasting his time.

  “Hello,” said a low voice.

  He had been bending over the fire, stirring the wood to get more heat, and he straightened quickly.

  “Hi,” he said as he turned.

  Kitty Jennings was wearing as brief a bathing suit as he had ever seen. It was the true Riviera-style Bikini, which seemed to have been improvised out of a pair of pale blue, lace-edged handkerchiefs. The sketchy little top supported her full breasts but made little pretense of containing them, and the lower wisp was barely enough to symbolize officially that she was clothed.

  “You drove my husband inside,” she said. “He couldn’t sit on the lawn.”

  “How come?”

  “The smoke from your fire kept drifting up there. He hates it, especially if it’s pine wood that’s burning.”

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “I was so busy I didn’t notice.”

  “He’ll only get drunk anyway. He can do that in the house as well as outside.”

  “Must be exciting for you.”

  “Hardly. I like a drink as well as the next one but he carries it too far. I’ve talked to doctors about it, but they say if a man doesn’t have the will he won’t cut down or stop.”

  “He gets around pretty well,” Eddie said.

  “In the chair, yes. The big thing is getting him into and out of bed. We should have a practical nurse to take care of him, but he insists that I do it. He says he couldn’t stand some strange woman looking at him without his clothes on.”

  “That’s old hat to a nurse.”

  “I know, but you couldn’t tell my husband that. He insists that it’s my wifely duty.”

  “You look ready for the water,” Eddie said, studying her figure and trying not to be obvious.

  “I spend as much time on the beach as I can. Carole uses the other lake. I think she goes in nude and she doesn’t want her father to know. He would be furious.”

  He removed the last of the traps from the water, and she asked a lot of questions about what he had been doing. He explained carefully.

  “Jim never did that,” she said.

  “Everybody to his own notion.”

  “I guess you know why Jim was fired, don’t you?”

  “He tried to bother you and the daughter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me doing that, Mrs. Jennings.”

  “Kitty,” she corrected him.

  “All right. Kitty.” He grinned. “When your husband isn’t present, that is.”

  Still wearing the gloves, he grasped the hot side of the tub and tipped it so that the water spilled onto the fire. A cloud of steam and smoke swirled around them.

  “I guess you’re pretty well taken care of,” she said.

  He put the tub aside and removed the gloves.

  “How’s that?”

  “Something a little bird told me.”

  “Then you know more than I know.”

  She laughed at him.

  “I didn’t mean to spy,” she said. “I was out for a walk last night and I saw Joan go to the garage. When I crossed the field I could look up into your room, and you didn’t have the shade down. She must have broken some sort of a record getting out of her clothes, because you were both bare and kissing when I saw you.”

  He felt as if he had been caught stealing money from a church.

  “Careless,” he said simply. “Very careless of us.”

  She laughed again.

  “Don’t let it bother you, Eddie. If you love the girl there isn’t too much wrong with it. She’s talked a lot about you and she sounds serious. Probably you’ll make it legal.”

  “She’s already married.”

  “But she’s going to get a divorce, isn’t she?”

  “As soon as she can.”

  There were a few things that he had to put away and he did so, fooling around inside the shed longer than he had to and hoping that she would leave. Just having her near him was enough to excite him, and if a guy was smart he didn’t allow himself to get excited over the boss’s wife. He could understand why the other trapper had made a play for her, but he was determined not to make the same blunder.

  “Care to join me in a swim?” she asked as he came out of the shed.

  “I’d like to, but I hadn’t better.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  “Your husband.”

  “Jim used to go swimming with me.”

  “Look what it got him.”

  “That was because he insisted on being fresh.” She fluffed out her hair and her lips had a slight pout. “All I’d have to do is tell Frank that you made a pass at me and that would be the end of you. You wouldn’t want me to do that, would you?”

  “Far from it.”

  “Then get your trunks and join me on the beach.” She took a deep breath and her breasts pushed up and out. “I’m not used to being refused, Eddie. It’s something that you should know.”

  His throat was dry and tight and the sweat poured out of his skin, running from his forehead down into his eyes and nearly blinding him. A swim, he told himself, wouldn’t do any harm. Maybe she wasn’t a good swimmer and she wanted someone handy in case she got into trouble.

  “Give me ten minutes,” he said.

  She strolled over and stood looking up into his face, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

  “I’ll settle on five,” she told him.

  And then she turned abruptly and left him, swinging down toward the lake, her half-clothed hips undulating provocatively.

  Something, he told himself as he picked up his T-shirt, wasn’t right.

  3

  EDDIE WAS busy that first week, learning the boundaries of the estate, hunting for signs of vermin and setting traps. Every morning he visited the traps he had already set, and in the afternoons he set more, either along the shore of Moon Lake or in the woods. One afternoon he had started for Goose Lake but a thunder shower had come up and he had given it up, spending the afternoon reading in his room. He had fallen asleep on the bed and he hadn’t awakened until Joan crept in close to him, her body all soft and warm and quivering with desires. Her passion mounted like lightning ripping through a tree.

  “We ought to be careful,” he murmured. “I told you that Kitty k
nows about us. And Jennings might not like it if he got wise.”

  “What about you going swimming with her every afternoon after work? You think he’d like that?”

  “We don’t do anything wrong.”

  “Jim used to do the same thing.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, and it cost him his job. But I still think there was more between them than she ever admitted.”

  “Aw, you’ve got your mind in the gutter.”

  Eddie hadn’t cared much for Jennings at first meeting, and the more he saw the man the less he liked him. He avoided his employer as much as possible. Therefore, he reported to him only once a day and displayed his day’s trophies. Of course, he didn’t have much luck the first few days, then his water sets began to click and he caught about three or four foxes every day, some reds and some grays. As for the raccoons and skunks, he tried not to catch them, not wanting to break the game laws, but a few wandered into his traps anyway, and he shot them with the twenty-two rifle which Jennings had given him. He had hopes of catching a young raccoon for a pet, but the only small one during that first week was too badly hurt and he had to dispose of it. He felt like a murderer as the poor little thing crouched in front of him, probably hoping for help and getting a bullet through the head instead. The raccoon was one animal he had always hated to kill. They seemed almost human the way they used their front paws and he couldn’t see that they did much harm. Of course they would kill smaller animals or rob birds’ nests, but nature had its own balance of power. He knew that no attempt to alter it would ever be successful. Every morning when he started out to patrol the trap line he told himself that he would keep this job only until he could find another. Had Jennings only been dedicated to exterminating vermin it would not have been so bad. But he was a sadist toward wildlife. Afternoons when he was drunk and barely able to see, he had Wilson push him down into the woods, and leave him there with a bottle. Then he sat there and shot at anything that moved. Eddie made it a practice to stay well clear since he had no desire to get his head shot off.