Two days came and went. My mind took a thousand detours, covering a dozen possible scenarios for my future, but then the third and final day dawned and I was back in the Jeep, on the road heading south to Rio Marinas, back to Lawton and a thorny nest of circumstances that I had no answer for. Perhaps one would come before I pulled up in front of the boarding house.
Chapter Ten
Extricating myself from Lawton Brady was not going to be easy. I knew that as soon as I decided to stick it out in Rio Marinas.
I said nothing for nearly two weeks. Lawton was busy, still embroiled in legal maneuverings and then a trip to Sacramento that took him away for several days. By the time he returned and his head was back into me, there’d been enough distance between us to make him take a second look at me and wonder.
“We haven’t been the same, have we?” he said, while we were kicking back, drinking beer on Miss Inez’ back porch. Over dinner, he’d relayed all the new information about his legal battle. I’d probed carefully, like a lawyer might, feeling a resurgence of interest in the profession that I’d given up. I’m sure he wondered why I cared, though I knew exactly – the discussion kept us off other subjects.
We had not made love, not once since our return. So, when he finally dived in with his own probing question about the nature of our relationship, he had good reason.
“I guess we haven’t,” I said, as if this was news to me.
“Something change?” he wondered. The sincerity in his expression stung. My gut wretched. I nearly started to cry, and might have, if a flock of seagulls hadn’t suddenly lifted off the beach and created quite a commotion before they finally flew away. My immediate emotion passed.
“Maybe,” I said, looking painfully chagrinned. I was in pain. Nothing in my feelings toward Lawton had changed. I was desperately in love, but I was also desperate. My heart ached, my sex hungry for his arms, his lips, his ravaging and ruthless demands. All I’d ever wanted in a man sat right beside me and I was about to give him up.
“Maybe?” he looked worried.
“Just been doing a lot of thinking. About me, mostly. I love you Lawton, but I think I need to back off for a while. I’m still smarting from my past…things haunt me…”
“What things?”
I shook my head. “It’s not something I’m ready to explain. But this – you and me – has happened much too fast.”
“Too fast? That’s ridiculous, Sam. And you’re telling me this now, after how many months?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry. That’s not enough. What got you so spooked? That girlfriend of yours?”
“No!”
“Then what, Sam?”
“I wish I could explain…”
“But you can’t. Is that it?”
I shook my head.
“And so you’re cutting me off?”
“No, I’m not cutting you off.” At the moment, even I didn’t know what I meant, or what I wanted. I knew I didn’t want to lose him, though I feared I already had. The thorny question had torn my insides apart for two weeks, and I was still no closer to having the right answers for Lawton Brady.
“So, what did you mean, Sam?”
I took a deep breath. “I can’t make a commitment to you, Lawton. That’s where I think things are leading…am I wrong?”
“Excuse me, if I thought we’d already gone that far.”
“But nothing was actually…” I stumbled here, “you know, official.” Damn! This was lame.
“So?”
I wasn’t getting through to him, but then what did I expect when I gave him nothing but a silly song and dance?
Lawton was not an easy man, and this conversation was every bit as difficult as I knew it would be. I felt childishly stupid, tossing off more meaningless platitudes, “I have to think things out…I just need time,” which were sure to make him wince.
He winced all right. Then shook his head, hoisted himself to his feet and squashed his beer can in his hand, before tossing it in the trash can.
He looked toward the sky, deep in thought. Then he turned to me.
“Some day, you’re going to give me an explanation that means something. What you’ve told me so far hasn’t been worth my time. You think about that, Samantha.” He stood over me, while I looked up afraid of what he’d say next. But he said nothing. He took his pursed lips and brooding eyes with him and left me to stew in the unreasonable mess I’d just made of a very good relationship.
***
Time elapsed, moving Lawton and I into a period characterized by strained silence and parsed conversations. Over the course of several months the deep freeze between us finally began to thaw. Our cordial, if not a little stilted, conversations at the diner gave way to a friendly repartee, much like what we enjoyed when we were first seducing each other. I almost thought he’d ask me out and was elated to even hope that much. By then, Ryder’s threats seemed like no more than a bad dream – even if, deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.
Then there was that lonely evening, when another trip to the movie house on Main brought me up short, when I watched from the back of the theatre as a jovial Lawton Brady escorted Sally Meacham to a seat halfway down the aisle and directly in front of me. They didn’t look particularly chummy, but they didn’t look like a nervous first date either. My stomach instantly soured as I tried to pour myself into the silly comedy. Finally, with green-eyed envy leading me on, I left with the movie not even half over and cried myself to sleep.
The next day, Lawton was at his seat in the diner, eating away at his cheese omelet while reading the latest edition of the LA Times. I served up a sunny smile along with his second cup of coffee, and just happened to ask, rather glibly, I thought: “Did you by any chance stay for the end of the movie?”
He looked up, puzzled for an instant. “You were there last night?”
“I was but I didn’t stay.”
“Then you missed a good one.”
“I guess it was one that I thought I could afford to skip.”
I walked away, busy with a table of fussing kids and their parents, and didn’t see Lawton again until later that day. Turning the key in my room door, I was surprised to find that it was already unlocked. A stealthy peek inside and my heart began to race.
At first it was Ryder’s profile – I guess that he’d been on my mind as I was walking in the boarding house door – but when the man turned around, it was Lawton pulling me into the room with an urgent force.
“Don’t you dare make a sound,” he whispered. Then he grabbed me and pushed me toward the bed with the terse order. “Take off your clothes.”
I shuddered nervously, unsure of what this was all about, but soon the fire igniting in my loins needed to be quelled and I began to undress. Lawton watched as the buttons on my blouse were opened one by one and I shrugged the thin material off my shoulders, then as the zipper went down on my jeans and the denim slowly peeled away from my skin. I kicked my sandals aside, still carefully watching him, as my bra and panties joined the rest of my clothes on the floor.
Stark naked. His eyes took in every bit of my aroused and trembling flesh.
The opening overture, a hard crack against my naked ass once he whirled me around, was followed by a wide open kiss and clashing tongues, followed by a hard shove against the bed. I fell on my back against the mattress; he fell to my chest. Passion erupted in furious waves, and for a moment the darkness of his spirit so matched Jon Ryder’s that I lost all the pertinent facts about where I was and who I was with. My conscious mind picked up somewhere between the first thrust of Lawton’s thick prick inside my desolate pussy and the first creaming climax. The whole time, he hardly stopped smacking my ass – and he told me to be quiet. Apparently, the order didn’t apply to him.
He finished off his first come with me on top and dancing on his prick. He moaned gratefully as he made his final jab, then, hardly missing a single beat, he reached up and grabbed my nipples, crushing them between h
is fingers to produce a steadily rising pain.
My pussy spasmed, trying to crush his organ with the same intensity.
“Come, slut!” he half whispered, half mouthed the order. “And not a sound.”
No, not a sound…I breathlessly, silently gasped as my body jerked and my pussy began to come, shooting warm jets of sexual nectar that flowed out onto his crotch. I opened my mouth to cry, but no sound came out. The grimace on my face must have told the story for me, of how earth shattering that climax became. It had only been weeks but it seemed that my previous life with Lawton had happened years before. If only I knew that we could repeat this day after day after day.
When he finally pulled away, he was on his feet seconds later. As he began to dress, his words were as crisp and terse as the fucking had been. “Come to the house Saturday night. Wear something nice.”
“Your house, you mean the cabin?”
“No, I mean the ranch house on the hill.”
My eyes got wide, asking their silent questions.
“I’ve had this crazy superstition that it’s the place where good relationships go to die. Maybe that is as silly as your hesitations. I’ll see you at six.”
When he left I was smiling again, cautiously yes, but smiling.
***
Six o’clock Saturday night was quickly on me. Not a thing to wear – the age old refrain made me as nervous as the thought of stepping into Lawton Brady’s front door.
Was taking that gigantic leap an important step for us? Did Lawton think that might bring us back to where we left off before my trip to San Francisco? Logic like that was clearly faulty. But how could I tell him that nothing had changed in me since our relationship was interrupted – except, of course, the physical need to have him? How crass, how whorish was that?
Friday night my head was swimming with far too much to think about. I slept restlessly and woke up Saturday still in a daze. Three times I tried on the little black dress I’d bought at the only dress shop in Rio Marinas. Three times, I tried to talk myself out of wearing the sexy thing. Lawton would love it, but would he love it too much, love me too much? Would I send the wrong message and have him trying to reel me back into a relationship that I had no business pursuing? Was that what this first official date at his precious ranch house meant? I really had no clue, but just the conversation in my head was enough to make me dizzy.
Jeans. Just wear jeans. It makes a statement, Sam! I told myself every time I hung the black dress back on the hanger. He can’t have you, he just can’t. And you can’t have him! But when five o’clock finally rolled around and it came time to make my decision, I slipped into the low back, cleavage revealing sheath and smiled. Why not? If this was the end of our affair why not go out with a bang, not a whimper?
I walked from the house to my Jeep, putting the key in the door and nearly opening the lock, when I suddenly felt a hand on my ass and a body snuggling up behind me.
“And here I get to have you in something besides blue jeans. How nice of you to dress for the night.”
Ryder. I smelled his scent before he even opened his mouth.
My insides trembled, although my fear of him was not as great as it had been before. Was I getting accustomed to the arrangement, to his popping up out of nowhere? Was the urgent need in Jon Ryder to satisfy his lust for power just another facet of my life that I needed to accept – like red hair and long legs and a demented need for kinky sex? Was the thrill I was feeling in my shaking bones becoming too familiar and too welcome to fight? Perhaps I could have wrenched myself away and ran – ran to Miss Bessie’s, or back inside the house, or straight to the Rio Marinas Police station. But I didn’t.
Inside the car, an ominously back SUV with heavily tinted windows, Ryder handcuffed my hands behind me and snapped a wooden hobble around my ankles. I looked down, absurdly thinking that my pretty patent-leather heels looked particularly appropriate next to the awkward wooden fixture that kept my ankles bound. I even noted with some interest that there was no gag, no blindfold. Maybe this would be a different sort of rape.
We drove north to where the road split off and for a while wound through the coastal mountains, then Ryder took off on a twisting dirt road that plunged us deeper into the California wilds.
Not a word was spoken, but the familiar pounding beat of arousal that infected us both had risen to a screaming peak by the time Ryder slowed to a stop.
My pussy spasmed involuntarily with the thought of his forceful erection drowning out all other thoughts.
He removed the hobble, a good thing, since I could have gone nowhere with it on, then looped a rope around my neck, and started off into the thick woods. Ten yards in, I stumbled, falling into a pile of scratchy branches, and then cried out when an impatient Ryder yanked hard against the rope, forcing me back to my feet. I stumbled on, faltering with nearly every step in my wobbly high heels, meanwhile my hair snatched twigs and leaves as it brushed against the untamed undergrowth. Ryder had no specific destination, just a large tree against which he could tie me. Once he found one suitable for his plans, the rope that ringed my throat was stretched around the tree trunk and tied off in a sturdy knot. Rope he’d grabbed from the SUV was used to bind me about my waist and thighs. That done, he removed the handcuffs so I could hug the tree with my outstretched arms. If I wondered whether the new black dress would survive the night, I had my answer within seconds. At least the sharp knife made a clean cut through the silky fabric. Although not until he ripped the dress wide open with his bare hands, did I realize that he’d not only ruined my dress but that he’d destroyed my night with Lawton in that same vicious swipe.
Until that moment, I hadn’t felt the chill in the air. But as soon as my back was bared for the punishment, the cold crept into my bones and settled.
Sexual arousal? It had been swept to some far corner of my consciousness, just a meager ticklish sensation now.
I waited as Ryder moved through the woods gathering long lean branches into a foreboding bundle. He made quite a ritual of stripping them clean, of whisking them through the air so we both could hear the sizzling sound as they split the night.
Gathered into his hand they were an awesome sight. I loathed them as much as I loathed Ryder, but the excitement inherent in that singular moment could not be exaggerated, and my sexual arousal soared again. My body shuddered long before Ryder lashed out with the first painful strike, and it did not stop shuddering during the entire duration of the punishment. From my shoulders all the way down my back, the flesh stung and an angry fire rose on my delicate skin. I cried out but there was no one to hear me but the rustling trees. No one to witness his abuse, no one to save me.
“Ah! How wet!” he said when he dipped his fingers into the valley between my thighs. “You never fail me, Kristen. I think if you ever did, I might stop.” But he thought again. “No, I think that would just inspire me to try a little harder.”
I gritted my teeth to prevent myself from sputtering the four-letter curses that came to mind. Ryder knew this, and his entire being was bent on mocking my distress, from his deliberately delicate touch to the final moment when his feral body rocked against me with his cock inside my ass and shot its vile seed.
I sighed relieved when he pulled out and began to untie me from the tree.
When he said, “Too bad I can’t have you for a few days like I did last time,” I was further comforted. He added that he was just passing through the area and needed a good fix. Like I was his drug.
We returned through the woods, the rope leash still around my neck and my hands re-cuffed behind me, my body minus all the clothes save the patent-leather heels. The drive into town was silent. Whatever sexual high I might have experienced in the previous hour was lost by the time we pulled up in front of the boarding house. Even the smile of triumph was gone from his face.
He wasted no time unlocking the cuffs and removing the rope from around my neck. Then he sat back and waited as if I’d flee the SUV on my own. �
�You really expect me to run in there naked?” I blurted out.
“Oh, right. You left your pretty dress in the woods, didn’t you?”
I fumed but refused to fight, meanwhile Ryder reached back behind the seat, digging through a pile of laundry and finally pulled out a wrinkled white t-shirt. He handed it to me, saying: “This should do.”
“This? That’s it? It’s not enough, Jon.”
“It had better be because it’s all you got.”
Before I could even put the t-shirt on, he reached in front of me and opened the passenger door, which made me scramble fast to make myself presentable.
Though it was eight maybe nine o’clock by then, the town was not yet shuttered. A few pedestrians walked by the car in front of us, while ten feet away, one of the condo guests was unpacking for a weekend at the beach, and just down the street a small crowd of teenagers was laughing riotously at some joke. In a fleeting dead space of street activity, I grabbed my purse from the floor of the SUV and fled up the front porch to Miss Inez’ front door. Luckily the t-shirt covered my ass, although I’m sure that it did not cover the marks that had been left by Ryder’s bundle of switches. Thank god the door was unlocked, and there was no one around to see me. I managed my flight upstairs with relative ease and was just seconds later inside my room and climbing on my bed for a good long cry, letting the emotion drain away.
For whatever reason, Ryder seemed to be renewing his vengeance with an urgency I’d not felt before, and I had every reason to expect that I’d see him again soon.
***
The fear, the panic and the hurt behind the latest attack seemed to vanish rather quickly once I realized I was safe again. But what about Lawton Brady? The six o’clock hour had come and gone. Not even a phone call to explain my absence. Desperation and panic seemed to rise up in me in a strange new way.
Nightmare of Vengeance Page 14