The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  Without detaching our bodies, I turned over so that I was lying on my back instead and Janina was straddling me. She leaned forward, planted her hands on my shoulders, and started grinding her hips into me with a slow, smooth, rolling motion, with my cock buried deep inside her. Then, as she started to come closer to orgasm again, she picked up the pace and started bouncing urgently on my cock, letting several slick inches slide out of her and then slamming herself back down to take all of it again. I reached out and started rubbing the pink nub at the top of her cleft while she did that, through the silvery blonde curls of her hair, which were of a softer texture than most other women’s. That additional sensation set her whimpering at a pitch that I knew meant she was about to come. I was close myself, but her bouncing rhythm wasn’t quite right for me.

  So I lifted her off me, flipped her over onto her hands and knees, and quickly reinserted my cock from behind. My right hand closed around her narrow waist and my left grasped along the bone of her hip. The position allowed me to pull the beautiful woman back into me while I thrust deep into her tunnel, and she let out a groan of ectasy when I slowly began to fuck her.

  “Harder,” she whispered after I had teased her with deep and slow thrusts for a good five minutes. “Please, Hal. Fill me up. I need it.”

  “Fine,” I grunted as I began to pick up speed, and then I hammered into her frantically for a few more minutes until the tightness of her trembling walls caused me to explode. The sensation of my seed filling her sent Janina over the edge at the same moment, and her body spasmed as I poured into her. Our climaxes were long and delicious, and I ran my hands over the creamy skin of her waist, back, hips, and ass during the blissful spiral. After we had slid down from our peaks, we collapsed panting into the grass, and I watched my milky seed leak out from between her perfectly shaped thighs.

  “I win,” Janina whispered up at the stars. “Two times. Once because of the bet, and twice because that was the best I’ve ever had.”

  Chapter Nine

  In the morning when I woke up, Janina was still deep asleep and completely naked, as was I. When I caught sight of her, my cock hardened instantly, and I was about to reach for her, but then something made me glance over at the campfire where we had left Katrina in Theo’s care the night before. Katrina was sitting upright sipping from a mug in her hand and coolly staring back at me. I sighed. My next round with her sister would have to wait, then.

  I quickly redressed. I could feel Katrina’s eyes on me throughout the process. I couldn’t help Janina back into her previous day’s clothes, because half of them were torn, and all of them were dirty from the ground and damp with dew. So I walked back over to the campfire and picked up a blanket.

  “Good morning,” I said to Katrina, and to Theo as well, since he was still hovering nearby.

  I walked back over to Janina, covered her with the blanket, and gently shook her awake. Most women, when I did that, sort of hummed in their throats and tried to snuggle up to me, or if they were sleep-deprived, maybe to roll out of my reach or swat my hand away. Janina, however, did neither.

  Her eyes flew open, and she sat bolt upright, which caused the blanket to fall off and to bare her breasts again. “I didn’t do it!” she cried out as her unfocused eyes stared past me.

  “Didn’t do what?” I inquired, as Janina blinked in confusion, stared at me in sudden recognition, and started to process her actual situation.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” the disheveled beauty replied calmly. She looked me up and down and smirked. “All I can recall is what we did do, last night.”

  “Well, I’d hope you wouldn’t be forgetting that any time soon,” I drawled, and then I tipped my head in the direction of the campfire, to draw her attention to the fact that Katrina was very much awake and appeared to have drawn the inevitable conclusions about our recent activities.

  “Oh, you’re quite right,” Janina said as she gathered the blanket around herself and stood up. She left her damaged clothes in the grass where they had fallen, and I wasn’t about to concern myself with them. At least that would be a few pounds off the mares’ load. “I mustn’t forget to collect on our bet.”

  As soon as the two of us rejoined Katrina at the extinguished campfire, the more blue-eyed of the twins immediately declared, “That doesn’t count.”

  “What?” Janina asked.

  “You know what,” Katrina said sharply. “Our bet. It doesn’t count.”

  “What on earth do you mean it doesn’t count?” Janina asked impatiently. “I’m sure that Mr. Hale will be willing to attest to the fact that we fully consummated--”

  “I mean, you cheated because you plied me with drink until I fell asleep,” Katrina interrupted.

  “I did no such thing,” Janina scoffed. “You’re the one who asked about the sherry first, in fact. And nobody forced you to keep drinking such excessive quantities of it, yet you did. And at no point did we determine any party’s potential consumption of alcohol to be a disqualifying factor, in any case. So! When we return to the house, I should like, nay, shall expect to receive my hundred gold coins.”

  “Hundred?” I repeated with amusement. I had killed men for less. I had never been paid to fuck a woman, any more so than I had ever paid to fuck one, but I had to admit that if the offer came up, and it was good for a hundred gold coins, I probably would have done it, assuming that she was neither repulsive nor diseased.

  “It’s not fair,” Katrina muttered.

  “No need to be jealous,” Janina purred.

  It was the closest I had ever seen them come to quarreling. In a way, I was a bit relieved that they did quarrel sometimes. If they spent all their waking hours in each other’s company without one cross word exchanged, they wouldn’t have been any kind of natural creatures.

  “Well, are you ever going to get dressed, or do you mean to ride into Sunderly in that blanket?” Katrina finally demanded.

  “There isn’t really anywhere to get dressed, is there?” Janina asked as she looked around at the open plains stretching in every direction, without so much as a grove of trees to hide among. Then she smiled brightly. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter, does it? After all, it’s nothing Mr. Hale hasn’t seen before.”

  She proceeded to drop the blanket and saunter over to their stack of luggage. Naked and sleek as a young gazelle in the light of the dawn, I reflected that she was one of the loveliest sights I’d ever seen. I also reflected that she evidently had a character flaw of rather poor sportsmanship.

  Both girls selected dresses a bit more formal and elaborate than the ones they had been wearing for the past few days, I suppose because of our impending arrival in Sunderly, the site of the poker tournament, and one of the largest towns for hundreds of miles around.

  Janina dressed herself out in the open, and I could tell that she enjoyed the sensation of me watching her. Katrina on the other hand opted to be modest and awkwardly hide under a blanket while she donned her layers of clothing. Out of politeness and concern that her mood already wasn’t the most pleasant, I refrained from pointing out that, while I may not have seen her body unclothed, I did now know precisely what she looked like naked too, given the exactness of the twins’ physical resemblance.

  Janina dressed in a daringly cut ruby red gown, a color that couldn’t fail to attract attention and made her appear paler and more ethereal than usual, and Katrina dressed in an elegant black lace-trimmed ivory gown that brought out the caramel in her complexion and the rosiness in her cheeks by contrast. They both looked as if they were going to attend a formal dinner, and they both looked certain to be the belle of any ball. I suppose it was fortunate that beauty was one regard in which they would never have to compete with each other or envy each other.

  I watered and saddled the horses while the twins were getting dressed and then pinning their hair into place, because that seemed preferable to me than doing nothing, and I was eager to be on our way. I did not, however, touch their monumental stac
k of luggage. That was their self-imposed burden to contend with. As a matter of principle I wasn’t going to let them escape the consequences of their frivolous and impractical choices in packing for the journey. So once they deemed themselves presentable, I leaned on Theo’s side and sipped a mug of the coffee that Katrina had brewed while I watched them fasten each of their suitcases one by one to the reluctant mares.

  Then, finally, we started off. Theo and I lagged a little behind and allowed the twins to go ahead of us. The landscape was quite barren and it was easy to see that there were no imminent threats within view. It was a crisp and beautiful morning, in a steely blue sort of way, and I could see a pair of eagles circling overhead. My family’s crest had featured lions, and that seemed right for them, with all the infighting that went on among them, and considering the way that any male who reached maturity became a threat, and the way that the females ganged up on their prey. But I had always felt a greater affinity for eagles and hawks. They were predators too. But they lived solitary lives, with only their mates if they so cared to pick one, and they were free and viewed everything from afar unless they spied something they wanted, and then they plunged down just long enough to snatch it and wheel off into the great beyond again.

  I was more focused on the landscape than on them, but I could hear snatches of the twins’ conversation carried back to us on the wind.

  “That isn’t true at all, you won the last bet,” Janina was saying to Katrina, who responded with something inaudible.

  “Well there isn’t any need to get cross about it,” Janina replied back. Again, I couldn’t quite hear what Katrina said, as she seemed to be a significantly more disciplined whisperer than Janina was, although both were clearly making some effort to keep their voices down, but it sounded like an emphatic negative.

  “Yes, you are,” Janina said. “And it isn’t as though… ” her sentence continued, but I couldn’t hear the rest of it.

  Katrina whispered back something else, in an indignant tone. Then both sisters faced forward as their mares continued to stroll along side by side and ceased their conversation. They presented matching shapely silhouettes, one in ruby red and the other in ivory, crowned with silvery blonde chignons.

  “You know, I rather suspected you would choose Janina,” Theo remarked to me, also in an undertone, although not quite at as low of a volume as I would have preferred.

  “What? I didn’t, she chose me,” I said.

  “I mean I thought she was the one you preferred,” Theo continued. The twins had started up another conversation by then, so I was less concerned that they were listening in, but I still tapped Theo to let him know to slow down and increase the distance between us and them a bit more.

  “I like both,” I replied honestly.

  “You mean you can’t see any difference?” Theo guffawed. Now that remark, I was pretty sure the twins did hear, although I was also sure they’d heard it a hundred times before. I rapped Theo lightly with my knuckles to caution him to quiet down.

  “No, I mean their personalities seem to me to have different advantages,” I said. “Janina is a bit more fiery, and Katrina a bit softer and more sensitive.”

  “Yes, so Janina’s more your sort of girl,” Theo said.

  “Generally, yes, but I don’t mind a bit of sweetness and normalcy now and then,” I replied.

  “You mean after Vera?” my horse inquired.

  I made a noncommittal sound in my throat.

  “It’s all relative, though, I suppose,” Theo continued. “They’re grifters and seductresses on a professional level. They didn’t exactly have a conventional upbringing, if they’re telling even half the truth about that, and they don’t have traditional ideas about men or marriage either. And, they may not be sorceresses, but they are magic users. So that’s your idea of ‘sweetness and normalcy?’”

  “Just about,” I said peaceably.

  Theo couldn’t argue with that.

  A few hours later, just as the sun reached its hottest point of the day, we arrived in the frontier town of Sunderly.

  It was one of the largest towns I’d seen yet out west, and it almost looked like a mirage, with the way it sprang up out of the barren plains. It was a miracle, without any roads to speak of beyond the ruts formed by wagon wheels and the grass stripped by the hooves of oxen, that so many people had somehow or other found their way there. It had probably about thirty public buildings, places of business or governance, and just about as many houses.

  The signs looked freshly painted, the gardens looked thoroughly weeded, and the people looked exceptionally well dressed and well groomed. The twins were still a striking sight due to their beauty and their identicalness, but their sartorial finery actually didn’t put them much out of place in the streets of Sunderly. Of course, if a good part of the passersby were visitors in town for the poker tournament, that would somewhat augment their collective appearance of prosperity. Only the leisure class could afford to do something as foolish as travel for tens of miles just to throw away their money on a hand of cards.

  Then I noticed there was a bit of a crowd congregating around one building in particular, folks lining up outside, and almost all of them wearing fabrics worth more than a miner’s yearly salary. They were chattering eagerly amongst each other, the ladies clutching parasols and fanning themselves, their male partners holding them by the elbows and tipping their hats to each other. Then I noticed the freshly painted sign propped outside the door of the building, which read “Tournament Enrollment.”

  “There,” I pointed. The twins, at this point, had fallen in beside me. Janina rode to my left, and Katrina to my right, while the luggage mares trailed behind us. The streets were broad enough to allow for this, unless another mounted party was attempting to pass, in which case we all filed out more narrowly. “Shall we go?”

  “Us?” Janina inquired in a tone of mild surprise. “I hardly think so, Mr. Hale.”

  “… If you wish me to wait in line on your behalf, considering such chores to be beneath your dignity, I shall of course require due compensation.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Janina replied. Her bow-shaped lips curved into a slight smile. The girls exchanged glances of amusement past me. I didn’t like the look of that. “What I meant is that Kat and I do not intend to compete in the tournament at all.”

  I didn’t say anything, I just looked at her, and then at Katrina. Their faces shone with mischief and their lips were pressed tight with the evident effort of suppressing laughter. They had never looked more identical. And I had no idea what they meant by it, but I was pretty sure that they did really mean what they said.

  They did not plan to compete in the poker tournament that we had just traveled three days to reach.

  They wanted me to ask a dozen questions. They wanted me to be bewildered and anxious for information. Maybe even to get upset about having been entangled in this journey on false pretenses.

  So I just shrugged and remarked, “I sure am glad you’ve finally seen the sense of abstainin’ from gambling.”

  “What?” Surprise flitted across Janina’s lovely, doll-like features, quickly followed by irritation. “No, that’s not--”

  “We don’t disapprove of gambling,” Katrina said indignantly. “We think it is a very fine and profitable endeavor.”

  “Well, that just can’t be so,” I said calmly. “Seeing as here is such a ripe opportunity for the highest stakes gambling event for miles around, or months to come, and here are the two of you, turning up your pretty little noses at it. No one would do a thing like that, who could afford the stakes, unless they saw gambling for the folly that it is.”

  “Look here, Mr. Hale,” Janina said impatiently. “Kat and I happen to be a pair of exquisitely skilled gamblers.”

  “Exquisitely skilled?” I snorted. “That’s one way to put it.”

  We had, by this point, passed by the crowd gathering to sign up for the tournament and strolled into a quieter part of
town. We weren’t really heading anywhere in particular, just eyeing the layout of the land.

  “I believe there is a high probability that, if we were to enter the tournament, one of us would win,” Janina continued as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “But, of course, a probability is just that: a mere probability,” Katrina added. “And with such high stakes riding on the outcome, that wasn’t satisfactory to me or my sister.”

  “We wanted nothing less than a guarantee,” Janina purred.

  “But how can you guarantee that you would win a poker game?” I asked. Even cheating wasn’t a guarantee of that. Not only could you get caught, or someone else could have sufficient luck to win legitimately in spite of your self-conferred advantages, others could also be cheating to an even greater effect. Other players could even be magical cheaters, too. I had no doubt that certain people with very specific magical powers had made a career of being cardsharps.

  “You cannot, but the game is however guaranteed to have a winner,” Katrina pointed out.

  “And everyone who’s in town at the time, and paying attention, is bound to find out who it is,” Janina said smugly.

  I was starting to think that I didn’t like the sound of this thought process very much.

  “And someone who was paying particular close attention, might even discover which direction that winner took when he or she left town, and in whose company,” Katrina added huskily. “Might even be able to track that person until they had left the bounds of Sunderly and the oversight of its lawmen. And exert some influence over the eventual disposition of the winner’s purse. If you understand my meaning.”

  “What I understand is that this would seem to activate that particular clause in my contract we discussed, wherein endangering yourselves by withholding pertinent information from me, your hired guard, is your own damn fault and none of my responsibility if it winds up getting you killed,” I answered. “Moreover, you did not hire me to commit a robbery. I am not going to rob anyone.”