Chapter 10

Roger Carmel slumped dejectedly at his desk. The papers in front of him were all a blur to him, their words and diagrams so much confused jumbles of print before his weary, agonized eyes. He hadn't slept well the previous night; hadn't really been to sleep at all, in fact, for too much preyed on his mind, too much kept eating at him, and his infrequent dozings had been more light, dream-filled slumbers between his tossing and turnings.

Martin Oliss had implanted a bomb in Carmel's brain, a ticking time-bomb of dread and agony and suspicion which Carmel would have almost preferred having it explode and get it over with. As it was, he was tortured by the passage of time before Oliss' private detective either confirmed or denied whether Carmel's wife, Lonnie, had fallen into the clutches of this blackmailing Lothario Oliss' own wife had become prey to this evil perverter, whoever he was, and it had taken Martin a great deal of courage to admit the defiliation of his home and marriage -- and Carmel was sure that the only reason he had finally broken down in the El Mecca lounge last night and told him anything was because Martin Oliss held the terrible secret that more than just Cylvia was involved, that now Lonnie was also part of the vile plot to corrupt and destroy Roger Carmel.

And Roger had absolutely no idea how he was going to handle the threat if and when the blackmailer came to see him, as he had Oliss. No plan of action, negative or positive, in defiance or in acceptance, had come to the miserable vice-president all of last night or this morning. He was stymied, thoroughly confused and wretched, unable to fathom the situation, much less how to handle it. The whole affair was so damned alien to him -- so utterly foreign to anything that he'd ever had to encounter before in his entire life! All his whirling mind could dwell upon was the sordid, despicable picture of his wife, his lovely, black-haired loving wife and mother of his beautiful child, in the arms and bed of another man.

His brain had continually swirled with lewd pictures of Lonnie and the animal-like unknown lover... his wife's curvaceous and alabaster naked body displayed abandonedly before him, her svelte, tapered legs spread and her rich, warm, moist thighs pulsing, her once sacrosanct vagina and breasts maddened and demanding, the unquenchable fires of her lust making her cunt spasm with excitement as her lover hovered over her... the pagan debaucher was a faceless lover, for all that Carmel envisioned was his hard, erect, blood pounding cock standing out from his loins, his sac of sperm bloated testicles swinging down between his once faithful wife's open thighs as she ground her squirming buttocks up and reached out to grasp his great throbbing penis and lead it toward her soft pink-rimmed pussy lips... and then the wet sluicing sound as the no-name man wormed his virile cock inside the quivering bearded mouth between her widespread legs, her cuntal tunnel clasping it with its own volition... The deep throbbing... the incoherent babblings as his desire-convulsed body reached for the magical apex of her climax... and then the lewd cascading of their subsequent cummings... and the pool of the man's white hot semen pooling in his wife's belly, mingling with her own sexual secretions...

With a piteous moan, Roger Carmel sunk his head to the desk, once more overcome by his lurid, treacherous vision, more vivid in his imagination than if he was actually there, seeing it all... and the horrible part, the thing that really made him feel sick, was that he wasn't sure he had reason to think such depravities. Oliss had emphasized last night and this morning over breakfast, that he could be wrong. The detective could have made a mistake... it was too soon to tell... wait and the phone call will tell all. So Roger, unable to stop the suspicions running rampant through his mind, was doubly damned for he could be doing his sweet young wife an injustice, a terrible slap against her purity.

But the thoughts just wouldn't go away -- as Oliss well knew and had counted on. Carmel fought back the waves of nausea, ashamed at him self for being so weak of character to allow himself to fall apart this way, of condemning his wife in his dreams before he had the evidence. He wanted a drink, two drinks, perhaps a whole bottle to help him forget. He'd become quite drunk last night, but not drunk enough... and today it was plain impossible to do any work. Not until this matter was cleared up one way or another. Thankfully, today was Saturday, and the factory was only open until noon. He would spend the afternoon by himself and get thoroughly drunk, so damned drunk that the lashing, whip-like images in his mind would go away...

A knock on the open door of his office brought him upright. He saw a girl standing in the door way, the secretary to Larson, the personnel manager. He didn't know the girl's name, wasn't especially interested at that particularly moment, and said in a brusque manner, "Yes? What do you want?"

Kim Copeland smiled tentatively. Demurely she clasped her hands in front of her clinging blue shift, and in a small, hesitant voice, she said, "I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr. Carmel, but..."

"Well? I'm very busy," Carmel snapped.

You son of a bitch, you're going to pay for this. Kim's brain looked at the muscular, handsome man who was frowning at her, and she felt the blood boil in her. Kim knew the best way of worming her way into the soft underbelly of a naive and preoccupied man like Roger Carmel, and long practice she judged that this was not the time to be seductive, bewitching, alluring; that was for later, after he had become friendly with her and his guard was down, and perhaps a couple of drinks was warming his stomach and dulling his thoughts. Now she had to be all sweetness and angelic helplessness, and although inside her beat the heart of a carnivorous feline, outwardly she trembled like the mousiest of retiring people.

As shy as she seemed to Roger, she still couldn't hide the fact that she was a beautiful sensual woman. She was proud of the thick coils of burnished copper hair, her soft, small hands and smooth white shoulders, of her ripe, up-lifted breasts and her large, round green eyes with their luminescent flecks of gold.

"Gee, Mr. Carmel, I didn't mean to..." She blinked her eyes sadly.

Carmel felt sudden pangs of guilt. For Christ's sake, pull yourself together! No reason to jump all over this nice, lovely girl... My problems don't have anything to do with her, and she's only trying to do her job. Roger had no way of knowing that her attitude and his reaction was exactly that -- part of her job, the job that she was doing for Zeigler. He said in a contrite voice, "I'm sorry, miss... ah."

"Copeland," she replied eagerly and stepped into his office. "Everybody calls me Kim, though. That's short for Kimberly."

Carmel managed to smile. "All right, Kim, what can I do for you?"

Hooked. The sucker is as gaffed as a salmon... "I came to tell you that your friend, Mr. Oliss, has already left the plant. He asked me to tell you that he won't be able to see you this afternoon." True enough... after I called that silly fool and told him Carmel was unable to meet with him. Kim rubbed her hands nervously. "I... I could have called you on the intercom to tell you but, well..." She lowered her eyes, as if afraid to continue.

Now I've frightened the wits out of her. Look at her shake! "Come on, Kim," Roger said softly. "But what? Don't worry, I won't bite."

"It was just that... that my car broke down, and... and if, if you were going to your motel in a little while..." She let the suggestion dangle.

"You want a ride home, is that it?"

"Oh, could you, Mr. Carmel? I'd be so grateful. It isn't far from the El Mecca, and otherwise, I'd have to take a taxi, and they're so expensive, and --"

Rower held up his hand, cutting off her explanations. "Of course I can, Kim. I'd be glad to." Least I call do to make up for the bastard way I first treated her. "Let's see," he said, "It's nearly eleven-thirty now. Do you get off at twelve?"

"Well, to be honest," she said, smoothing her dress front, seemingly unconscious of the way the thin material clung to her rounded thighs and dipped into the hollow of her pussy, "I can leave anytime you're ready, Mr. Carmel. My work is finished and Mr. Larson didn't even come in today."

"In that case, get your coat and your purse, and we'll go right now." Carmel was glad for the excuse to leave. He stood, smiling. "And for heaven's sake, if I'm going to call you Kim, then you should call me Roger. Okay?"

"You know the rules about being too familiar with executives, Mr. Carmel -- Roger," Kim said coyly, a small smile dimpling her cheeks. "I wouldn't want anybody to hear me call you by your first name."

"Nonsense," Roger said expansively. "I'll take full responsibility. Besides, as of right now, we're both off work. Right?"

"Right!" And Kim Copeland left with a swirl of her dress and a brief flash of her lovely, slim legs.

The Chevrolet which Roger had rented at the airport was a large, two-door business Impala which almost steered itself as Roger cruised through the downtown Kirsten traffic. For a small town, it sure had enough people, he thought as a car cut him off, making him swerve into the next lane, but then this was Saturday and all the locals would be shopping, he supposed. Kim Copeland was thrown against him, and she gasped with a startled cry as the softness of her breasts brushed against Roger's shoulder. Her touch made him acutely aware of her presence, more than all of the laughing and pleasant conversation they'd indulged in since leaving the Skopos plant.

Kim, he had found, was a smart, sparkling woman, and the rapport between him and her was easily established. He realized in that sudden moment of physical contact that she had allowed him to forget his deep-set troubles, and for those few minutes of grace, he was eternally grateful to her. The lurid green-with-jealousy mental picture of his wife being fucked senseless by another man became more remote as the miles passed, and by the time he parked in front of her apartment house, he was almost sad to see her leave him.

Nothing sexual, he hurriedly told himself. Nothing like that at all. Just because Lonnie was -- he snapped the sick reverie as a hot coal began to burn once more in his belly. He turned to the stunning beauty of Kim Copeland and felt the tingle of her provocative physical aura and the relief from his bitter depression. He said: "Well, this is it, Kim. Glad I could be of service."

"Won't you come up for a cup of coffee?" she asked, her wide eyes dispelling any salacious intentions such an invitation might arouse. Roger felt torn between the natural hesitation of a married man to be alone with so alluring a female as Kim and the reluctance to once more be alone. She purred through her slightly moistened lips, "Or a drink? It's a little of that old Indian Summer today, and sort of hot. I could use a gin-and tonic, and I don't like drinking alone."

She placed a friendly, warm hand on his leg -- not too low, nor so high as to warn him, scare him off, just at the place mid-leg where a hand might touch innocently. But Roger felt her electric contact, and his mouth went dry. "I... I really don't know if I should."

"Do you have anything planned for right now?"

"Well, no, not really. I..." he looked at her, weakening, and bit his lip. "I don't know if it would be right, that's all."

Kim laughed lightly, like a spring nymph enjoying the morning dew. "Oh, you men, always thinking about your wives!" She chuckled again with a lilting, teasing manner. She moved like a lithe cat, her breasts pushing against the fabric of her dress. "As you told me, Roger, I won't bite."

The reference to his wife, if only in a passing, allegorical way, made Roger jerk on the car seat. His heart trip-hammered. "What about my wife?" he said in a halting voice.

"Nothing, Roger," Kim said innocently. "It's just that so many nice men like you place their wives in ivory towers, and stop considering them flesh and blood. Sometimes," she added with a rueful almost ironic smirk, "it can be a rude awakening."

How true. How God-damned true, Roger glumly thought. Kim hit the nail on the head. And what the devil, why shouldn't he go up and have a drink with this delightful, young woman? Surely no harm would be done... certainly nothing like the harm his own black-haired bitch of a wife was doing to him. If she was, he had to keep reminding himself, if she was...

"All right, you convinced me, Kim," he said, and his heart suddenly felt free, for in the sixteen years of marriage he hadn't so much as looked at another woman much less been with one alone and socially.

It was just like Kim said, he had placed his wife in the realm of the gods, and she wasn't. His entire concentration on Lonnie had been unrealistic, and now that there was the possibility that she didn't consider her husband as the be-all and end-all of creation, and was unfaithful to his dream-like image of her. His ivory tower of devotion was crumbling rapidly now that its inherently impractical, sand-like foundation had been cracked by Oliss' lewd and evil lies. And Kim Copeland, amoral whore that she was, had been tipped to this by Zeigler, and with callous disregard or sympathy, started the final razing of Roger Carmel's idyllic world, coldly and calculatingly using her feminine and lurid wiles with all the effectiveness of a master game player. Roger Carmel never really had a chance.

Her apartment was facing the rear garden on the third floor, and was a spacious and attractive one-bedroom flat. Roger was a little surprised that a secretary could afford the obviously fine quality of Danish modern furniture and hand-rubbed walnut lamps and fine prints on the walls. There was a heady scent of musky perfume in the air -- not unusual for a woman's apartment, but it nevertheless tickled Roger's nostrils, making him quiver with unexplained lightheadedness. He grinned as he sat down on the comfortable couch, thinking of candle-light and old crystal decanters and violins. Hell, there was no use denying it, for all of Kim's apparent shyness, she was a very sensual, very passionate woman. Her modesty was all the more appealing to him, for that meant she wasn't just a promiscuous bitch in heat, but considered the men in her life as important and desirable for their minds and affections as their prowess in bed.

May God! Stop thus kind of lewd thinking! Roger felt ashamed as Kim talked innocently from the kitchen while making the drinks. How wrong he was about her character never entered his head; the setting, the actions the whole web she had designed to lure and capture were too cleverly done; the stage backdrop was authentic, only the woman who starred in the leading role wasn't. Roger chastised himself for harboring lewd thoughts about Kim Copeland's love life -- for all he knew she was a virgin. Hell, the next thing he knew, he'd be getting half-way romantic intentions about her, and just because she invited him up for a drink certainly didn't give him the right to entertain overheated and wicked notions. The shock of realizing that he was contemplating what she would be like in bed was enough to scare him...

"I see you made yourself comfortable, Roger," Kim said, walking in from the kitchen with two full glasses. "Slip off your shoes if you want."

"Oh... no, no this is fine," he replied and took the proffered glass. "Mmmm," he said after tasting the gin and tonic.

"You like? I make them strong, because that's the way I like them."

"Excellent, Kim." He looked around the apartment in obvious appreciation. "You certainly have a fine place here."

"Thanks to my husband," she said with a touch of girlish sarcasm. "He left me flat, with no money and no warning. All I had after he skipped was what you see here." A complete fabrication -- she'd never married any of the men she'd lived with.

"You were married?" he asked inanely.

"Too long," she replied. "And never again. Couples lie to each other more than strangers do, I think."

Her comment raised the intangible devil of Lonnie again, sweetly cooing her affection for her husband, while Roger was kept blissfully unaware of her adulterous relations while he was gone. He shook his head and drank heavily. Well, one thing was clear; Kim was no virgin, not having been married, and Roger bet mentally that this sweet young secretary-divorcee was one holy terror in bed. Just watching how she walked and smiled and smelled was irrefutable testimony to that...

"Excuse me, will you, Roger?" Kim asked, jumping up. "I want to get cleaned up and out of this old stuffy work dress. Do you mind!"

"No... no, of course not..." Roger blinked, for her "old work dress" was anything but stuffy -- not with that second skin look it had as it clung to her voluptuous young body, and the way it stretched around her firm pointed breasts and ripe thighs. But he knew how women love to get rid of the reminders that they have to work; when Lonnie had been a salesgirl in a local department store during their first, poverty-stricken years of marriage, she'd been the same way.

Kim kept the door of her bedroom open so that she could continue to talk to Roger as she changed. He could hear the zip as she took her dress off, and he quickly drowned his imagination of her standing naked in there, a few feet away, by swallowing his gin and tonic. He looked down at his glass again, embarrassed. How stupid he'd feel if the lovely girl in the next room knew he was thinking such things? He drained his glass, and as the gin swirled in his stomach and fused through his blood, a strange confidence that he'd never possessed before seeped through him. He was a man, wasn't he? Why shouldn't he be excited by the lascivious thoughts of a pretty young girl naked?

Across from him, between the living room and the bedroom, was a narrow door, which Roger subconsciously assumed was for a closet. It was -- in a way. A special closet in which a man sat in darkness, between two windows, both two-way mirrors. On the living room side the mirror was an ornate framed decorative piece which matched a credenza and small table next to it. The man, named Harry Saunders, was not looking out into the living room through the two-way glass; he was busily watching through the other mirror, into the bedroom. On the bedroom side the glass was the dresser mirror, canted at a slight angle so that it overlooked the full expanse of the double bed. The man was moistening his parched lips and trying to stop the heavy sound of his breathing, for in the clear glass was the lovely and lust-enticing sight of Kim Copeland dropping her simple blue sheath on the floor. He felt a jerk in his pants as his cock began to throb with desire, and kept his beady eyes leveled on her beautiful body as she moved slowly around the bedroom, fully aware he was there, for she had hired him and put him in the closet and told him to be ready with his camera for another job of blackmail. He'd done this kind of work for her and some of her other whore friends before, and did it well -- his fee was moderate, and all he asked was the added bonus of fucking them when the sucker left. His testicles ached with the lewd thought that in a couple of hours he was going to possess that desirable, soft young cunt as he had many times in the past. She was one piece of ass he had never grown tired of!

Saunders felt another slight jump under his pants, his prick hardening as Kim turned from the mirror and bent over to pick up her dress from the floor. The full rounded moons of her buttocks came into tantalizing view, and she couldn't have been more than three feet from him, and she gave the camera man a full, unimpeded view of the narrow nylon strip of her panties between her firm full thighs as they tightened into her vagina as she bent over. He watched her with bated breath as then she stripped them off along with her bra and stood running her hands up and down her satiny smooth skin, cupping her firm, molded breasts for a moment, then dropping down to rub her soft pubic hair and tease her pink-edged vaginal slit before opening a dresser drawer and selecting a pair of sun shorts and halter. He almost groaned as she slipped the tight clothing on, looked around once, winked directly at him, and stepped freshly into the living room.

Saunders quickly moved around in his stool, saliva forming at the corners of his pudgy mouth. Old Zeigler was going to get a set of photos, by damned; one hell of a hot set -- for Kim was in rare form today, and when she got like this she could fuck a man to death ! Saunders didn't know why Zeigler wanted the pictures, or who the sucker in the living room was but he knew that when they got down to nakedly writhing on the couch or in bed, he was going to have his hands full snapping the shutter of his camera.

Roger Carmel was stunned by Kim Copeland's change into "something more comfortable." She wore short-shorts of bright red, so tight that her pubic mound and its teasing little cuntal cleft was impressed on the cloth between her white thighs. Her long, statuesque legs, bronzed from the sun of Nevada, were bare and curvaceous, and her belly was just as tanned and nude between the band of her shorts and her strained halter. Her breasts quivered, barely concealed by the thin halter, and Roger could almost make out her nipples. Her sparkling green eyes sparkled vivaciously and with a hint of fire.

She moved panther-like to the couch. "You finished your drink. I'll make you another." She seemed to catch his wide-eyed stare for the first time. "What's the matter, Roger? I plan to go out and suntan after you leave. I hope this isn't too much for you." She smiled slyly as she undulated toward the kitchen. "Don't forget, I won't eat you."

She didn't add the word she was thinking: "Yet."

Before he could protest, Kim she was back out of the kitchen, gin bottle in hand, glasses full of ice and tonic. "I thought it would be better if we made them out here from now on, don't you?" She didn't wait for his strangled reply, but sat down very close to him and crossed one slim, tanned leg over the other, tightening the material of her shorts until the pulsating slit of her pussy was sharply defined, and as she mixed his drink and handed it back to him, she leaned forward so that a good deal of her creamy, globular breasts were exposed to him -- with just the bare hint of her ruby colored and rock hard nipples. He felt a flush creep up his neck. Yet he was unable to take his eyes off her provocative lushness. Like it had a life of its own, his cock gave a tentative spasm against his underpants, and his testicles contracted with a lewd spark of excitement. Quickly he took a long pull on his gin and tonic.