It was a man. Shirtless, in pantaloons, masked. The last thing she remembered, before losing consciousness was the way he was moving towards her and how, in his hands casually, but very purposefully, he was uncoiling a long rope.
I’m going to be raped, she told herself, in that odd, calm little voice you use inside for something impossible but true.
Ashley awoke again briefly, sometime later, with a dim awareness of someone carrying her into an elevator and then up to the top floor, across the threshold to a secret penthouse.
Chapter Four
Andrea awoke in paralyzing darkness. Panicking, she tugged at her limbs. She couldn’t move. It should be morning, so why couldn’t she see? Pressure on her eyelids, that was it. A blindfold. And that tightness on her ankles, it was the cuffs, the ones Tom had used on her to secure her to his bed. There were cuffs on her wrists, too. But what was that itchy, sticky feeling all over? Mud, probably, from the road, from being fucked on her back in the soaking wet mud. Tom hadn’t cleaned her up. And then he’d left her like that. The whole fucking night!
“Tom! Where the hell are you?!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
“Hang on, honey,” he called out. “I’ll be right there.”
Honey? Who was he kidding? Sure, she’d asked him for every bit of what he’d done to her, even had him give her rum so she could stomach it all, but how could he just leave her like that, totally degraded and alone, passed out?
She heard the door open, felt the bed settle beside her. He was sitting down. “I made you some breakfast, sweetie,” he chirped. “It’s your favorite – Eggs Benedict. Here let me get this blindfold, then we’ll get you cleaned up.”
Andrea winced as light flooded her eye sockets. “Ow!”
“Sorry, sugar. I forgot about your eyes being used to the dark.”
She glared at him, sitting there in his robe, his hair freshly washed and slicked back. The bastard had actually showered and shaved while she lay sleeping in his piss. “Seems like that’s not all you forgot, is it, sugar?”
He held up his hands. “Baby, it’s what you told me to do. You don’t remember making a scene, screaming every time I tried to let you up?”
Andrea balled her hands into fists. Right now she wanted to plow at least one of them into his smug, self-righteous puss. “How generous of you to give me my way,” she spat, arching her back. “Damn it, why is the sheet sticking to me?”
“It’s the plastic mattress cover. I put it down to keep the bed clean. But Andrea, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
She flashed a disgusted look. “Just let me up, okay? Then you can talk all you like—to yourself.”
“It’s about us,” he continued, blithely opening the wrist cuffs. “Our relationship.” She watched him move to her ankles. She had every intention of kicking him down there as soon as she was free. “Oh, yes,” she agreed sarcastically. “Tell me all about it.”
Her legs were too weak to kick. Something was getting into the abrasions on her stomach, too, aggravating the whip marks. It was probably the salt in the urine. Unsteadily, throwing her feet over the edge of the bed, Andrea got up.
Tom was right there in her face. “Baby, don’t be mad. It was consensual, you know it was! Just give me a minute to—”
One hand laid on her was enough to set her off. He’d hardly clamped his grip on her upper arm when she went for the jugular. Literally. It was amazing what you could do with two fingers, she thought in amazement, watching him sputter on the floor, his hands at his neck like a turtle on its back. She could really see now why her father had insisted on her taking that self-defense class before going away to San Rialto College.
“All men are potential predators,” Malcolm had warned. “We have animal urges that override every other impulse, good or bad.” She hadn’t believed it, at least not where he was concerned, but then again even he had his dark side.
“That was consensual, too,” she said, looking down at her defeated lover. “The minute you hurt me, you consented to retaliation.”
Unfortunately, the effects of the windpipe blow were temporary.
“But, baby,” Tom implored hoarsely, crawling to her feet. “I love you!”
“You love me?!” she cried in disbelief. “Last night you abuse me and today you love me?”
“I always have loved you, Andrea, from the moment I laid eyes on you,” he swore, putting his lips to her toes, half covered in faded silver polish. “I can see it all now, so clearly. All the things I did to you weren’t about Ashley—they were things I wanted you to do back to me.”
That was the last straw.
Reaching down for his hair, Andrea got a good grip on it and used it to get him on his knees. “You can see clearly, huh, lover boy? Then tell me—have you even tried to talk to Ashley, to see how she’s feeling, if she’s okay? Anything?”
“I’m a worm, I know,” he agreed, as she bent his head back painfully. “I deserve everything I get.”
“What’s this really about, Tom? Could it be you feel that ten million dollars of Ashley’s slipping away and now you want a piece of my half? Yes, that got your attention, didn’t it? See, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since last night—being tied up will do that to you—and you know what occurs to me? As horrible as I’ve behaved, and as much as I hurt Ashley, you never once did anything to protect her or honor your supposed love for her. You let it all happen, Tom. You should have stopped me. You were the man. The minute I came near you, you should have told me to go to hell. Instead you put the whammy on me, drew me in deeper, till I couldn’t control myself.”
“It’s true,” he whimpered, “all of it. You should whip me, Andrea, whip me till I scream.”
“Tempting,” she admitted. “But I think you’d enjoy it a little too much.” Releasing his hair, she pushed him away with the bottom of her foot. He lay prostrate, looking like a lost puppy – pathetic, truly pathetic.
Picking up the whip from off the dresser she made a few slices through the air. Sin boldly, that was what her father had said to her that fateful night two months ago, the last time she had seen him. The last time she might ever see him. Andrea studied the braided leather, the delicious shape. What was its appeal, anyhow? Was it the contrast to soft, pink flesh, like the kind that was available to her right this instant at her feet? Certainly Tom deserved it, nearly as much as she did herself. If he had been any kind of a man, he’d have tossed her out of his car the moment she took off her bra.
But he hadn’t. He’d been weak – weaker than her – not like a man was supposed to be. Not like her father, who’d stood tall and proud, who’d raised her to be a lady, who’d sacrificed everything, never remarried, turned down all kinds of offers, because no one could be trusted to raise his little girl. Malcolm’s own needs were always last. A lonely rancher who’d made a fortune off a tiny stake in one thoroughbred, but had given up even that life because of the time on the road, the bad influences. A normal life, a perfect life was what he’d given Andrea, as he took his place on the school board, the church board and every other organization of the small northern California town they called home. Tall, quiet, pillar of the community; that was Malcolm Daniels.
Andrea had loved him for all of it, owed him everything, but it wasn’t till that one night that she’d learned just how much he had given up; not just his freedom, but his very soul.
Holding the whip over the cringing Tom Winters, she felt herself back there again, back two months ago, at quarter past midnight on a Tuesday. She had just come home from school for spring break a few days early, to surprise him. The lights were on in the barn, so she assumed he was there working with the new filly he’d acquired. She was laughing, thinking how she’d tease him for never letting go of his work.
Sure enough, she could see his silhouette in the riding ring. He was moving in a slow circle, holding a leading reign, a whip in his other hand. When Andrea got closer, however, she made a horrifying discovery. It wasn
’t the new horse being broken in, but a filly of another kind. A woman, brunette, tall, shapely, her hair tied back tight in a bobbing tail. She wore a leather harness, and she was bridled, a metal bit in her mouth. Under the halogen lights her skin, which had been oiled down, was shiny and slick with sweat.
She’d been running, galloping under the control of her father. Mesmerized, scandalized, Andrea continued her slow, invisible approach. Speech evaded her, as did the power to run away, which is what she wanted very much to do. As she approached the rear of the ring, covered in shadow, Andrea made a second discovery as she nearly tripped over another woman, a blonde, on all fours in the dirt at the gate. This one was also naked, save for a saddle, made of leather, cut to fit her human sized waist. Her head was down, and when she looked up, there was wide-eyed embarrassment in her eyes. Leaping to her feet, she frantically tried to undo the bit in her mouth. By now Andrea’s father had discerned what was happening and he came running, calling out Andrea’s name, a look of utter pain and defeat in his face.
“Andrea, sweetheart, please wait!” he called, but Andrea had already turned to flee. She was fast, an accomplished sprinter in high school, before turning curvaceous and boy crazy in college. Long hair flying, her peasant dress flapping in the breeze, Andrea ripped across the open field like a gazelle, though in her shattered mind it all felt like slow motion.
Why she’d gone inside their split-level log house to barricade herself in her room instead of driving away in her banana colored convertible, she wasn’t sure. At any rate, it allowed her father time to send the women home, with double their rate of pay, and then to compose himself before gently tapping on her door a half hour later. Andrea couldn’t come out, couldn’t even answer. All night she lay there while outside in the hall she could hear him breathing. She could picture him sitting there, his back to the wall, next to the door. She knew he would wait there forever if need be. Unable to get comfortable in her bed, Andrea curled up on the floor, just beyond the wall where he was keeping vigil. Somehow, being close to him watching over her made her feel safe.
He was still sitting here, wide-awake when she came out just before dawn. He hadn’t slept a wink, though he looked up at her with a focus, an alertness she had never seen in a human being or even thought possible from one.
“Andrea,” he said simply, rising to his feet, his eyes swollen, still conveying boundless pain, even as he revealed gratefulness that she was deigning to speak with him again. “I must explain to you what you saw.”
Barefoot, dressed in one of the short nightgowns, which she used at school to attract and torment boys, she went to him, throwing herself into his arms. “Daddy, you don’t owe me any explanation.”
His embrace was surprisingly weary, almost trembling. “It isn’t to defend myself,” he said, with all the resignation of a man on his way to the gallows, “but to teach you what you must know now about yourself. My time is already passing, but for you, it may not be too late.”
For the next five hours, side by side with her on the porch swing, overlooking the boundless sky, he’d told her the history of her birth. The nature of the strong, though brief relationship to Elizabeth Van Voorst, her mother, and finally the story of the tragic, though in his opinion necessary separation of the remaining two triplets.
“Normal people would not have done such a thing,” he’d said, his eyes never wavering from the horizon. “But your mother and I were touched by forces few can understand. Demons, spirits, the power of nature, an unusually potent dose of ancestral blood, who knows? But we could never live normally. Together, we’d have cast your life and your sister’s into ruins. And yet alone, with no child to strengthen us, to give us hope, to remind us of one another and of our love, we would have gone mad, one or another or both of us.”
He’d called it the spirit of the silver wolf. The creature which is alone capable of baying at the new moon, as well as the full one. There was a native word, from the tribe whose blood they bore a tiny portion, but things like that never stuck in Andrea’s brain. The bottom line, in Earthbound, non-spiritual, non-dad terms was that he could only be aroused by dominating and controlling a submissive mate. Libby had been such a woman. After leaving her, for Andrea’s sake, he’d suppressed those desires and with them the very urge for sex itself. Raising her, building the ranch, became his life. He had no regrets and he never would allow guilt between them. But after she’d gone away to school, he’d been faced for the first time with loneliness, gnawing and terrible.
A relationship was out of the question, so he’d turned to professionals—women willing to live out his needs and serve his desires for the right price. The two Andrea had seen were examples of such creatures, the latest in a series. Naturally they were never injured and he was both scrupulous and generous in caring for their safety and their financial needs. While the arrangement did not really satisfy his emotional needs, he told her, it did take the edge off his discomfort.
For her part, Andrea had been able in the discussion to assure him that there could never be a question in her mind that he loved her, and that she knew in her mind and in her heart that he was patently incapable of ever acting selfishly or out of malice towards her. He’d smiled weakly, but she could see the burden he carried was too great for her to ever lift.
“You do not understand,” he’d said at last. “For you have not yet begun to touch your own pain. Your spirit song lies within you, unsung. Tragedy alone will release it: disillusionment, anger, the soul-shattering trail of tears. To begin, you will grow to hate me.”
No, she hadn't understood this at all. What she did gather, though, was that she could not stay with him any longer, and that she must go on what he called a quest, to seek her mother and sister. He knew where they were, had all along, though he’d never made contact or revealed their whereabouts.
Admittedly, Andrea was strangely thrilled to discover that she had a sister, a twin, but how could she leave her own life behind—particularly school, with its many distractions, most of them in the form of virile men?
“I will not ask forgiveness for not telling you about Ashley or Libby or Alicia,” he said, having helped her stow her clothes in the trunk of the little car he’d bought her last fall, “but I will ask something else of you. Something that will be difficult on your heart.”
“Please,” she’d begged, tears in her eyes, “don’t ask me to hate you. I couldn’t’ bear it.”
“You will hate, Andrea, when it is time,” he’d said soberly. “No one can prevent the seasons of things. Our relationships are always fixed. A wise man or woman knows that at any given moment, only one question may be asked of another, one request, stemming from the only true possibility of that moment.”
So what was his one thing he had asked of his daughter? Andrea laughed now, thinking about it. Was it know thy self, or to thine own self be true or even remember to brush your teeth? No, her father, the churchwarden and former head of the PTA had told her to sin boldly.
Andrea leveled the whip at Tom’s shoulder, snapped it briskly, just enough to sting. She’d certainly answered that request of Malcolm’s, hadn’t she? Or had she missed the boat entirely? Probably, she thought sadly.
“On your knees,” she commanded, tapping Tom’s thigh with the stiff leather.
He complied at once, his eyes happy and grateful when she raised his chin with the tip of the whip. “I’m yours,” he said, hoarsely.
“Strip,” she commanded.
Instantly he shed the half opened robe and spread his knees to reveal a raging hard on. She smiled wryly. What beast spirit did he have, she wondered, this man who wanted to submit to a woman? Not the silver wolf, certainly.
She brushed both nipples, trying to figure out if she could make him come without even touching him below. “Kiss the whip,” she decided. “Kiss it and lick it.”
Tom complied, his eyes practically rolling back in his head with pleasure. Too bad it did nothing for her.
“Enough, you
prick.” Andrea spread her feet, tapped the whip imperiously in her left palm. “It’s time to see how well you obey. Get up on that bed and put the cuffs on your ankles. Because I’m not a pig like you, I’m going to let you take the dirty plastic off first.”
“Thank you,” he said, leaping to do her bidding.
“Hands over your head, lay back,” she instructed, when he’d secured his feet.
Closing his hands in the wrist cuffs, she smacked his tight abdomen with the flat of her hand. “Now it’s your turn to wait, big boy.” Running her nails over his manhood, she added, with a wink. “When I come back from my nice long, hot shower, I’ll be checking on you and if you’re a good little worm and you keep that erection, I might do something with it. Of course, if I do, I won’t be thinking of you, I’ll be imagining a real man inside of me. The kind with the balls to show respect to the woman he supposedly loves.”
“But I love you!” he wailed.
Andrea pressed her nails into his cock, just enough to shut him up. “Open that mouth again and I’ll find something real nasty to gag it with. Understood?”
Tom nodded vigorously, indicating his desire to cooperate.
Treating him to a very sensual wiggle, Andrea walked to the bathroom. The shower water was paradise, hitting her skin like another world, washing over her guilt and pain. Sin boldly. What the hell did Malcolm mean by that anyway? And how could she ever face him again to ask, after what she’d done? Worse still, how would she ever face Libby or Ashley?
Ashley; the very name, the image of that sweet face brought a lump to her throat. Why had she set out so deliberately to hurt her poor, sweet twin, so innocent and trusting? A virgin, no less, at least according to a late night confession made during one of the girls’ making-up-for-lost-lifetimes sleepovers in Ashley’s room.
“What is it like?” Ashley had wanted to know, wide-eyed, sitting cross-legged on her childhood bed in silk panties and midriff shirt, her hair in pigtails. “Being with a man, I mean? And did you really go all the way before?”
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