Chapter 2

"Honey, do you like Mr. Blackwell?" Nadalee asked suddenly, interrupting the after-dinner silence in the living room and causing Newton Parker to lift his eyes from the Bible he was reading. He did not answer her right away and sat staring across the dimly-lighted room with a pious scowl on his face. Reading Scripture and quiet meditation for nearly two hours every evening were practices that his farmer parents had taught him and he devoutly followed them. Nadalee knew perfectly well that this was a sacred time of day and he resented her intrusion.

"Well, honey, do you like him?" the redhead asked again.

"Nadalee, I'm trying to read the Bible," Newton said sternly, turning his head to glare reprovingly at his lovely youthful wife. "We'll talk about Mr. Blackwell later... when it's time to go to bed."

"Sure, honey, it's all right with me if we talk about it later," she nodded obediently. Resigning herself to the fact that she would have to wait out the long stretch of lonely stillness before her, she shrugged her shoulders and settled back in her chair then to gaze downward at the floor. Just as always, she would spend this time pretending to pray and think divine thoughts but really she would be mulling despairingly over the emptiness of their life together. It was nothing unusual at all. It was Newton's regular habit to postpone their daily "talks" for bedtime and when they were finished, instead of touching and caressing her, making her feel loved, he inevitably announced that they had better get to sleep because tomorrow would be another "hard day of work."

"Why?"

"Why what, Newton?"

"Why do you want to know if I like Mr. Blackwell?" he asked, curiosity as well as irritation in his voice now. He could not focus his attention again on the passage he had been reading while her question continued to play on his mind, intriguing him to the point of bewilderment. He could not for the life of him understand why she had thought to ask him that.

"Oh, it's nothing important," she said softly, surprised that he wanted to know enough to persist this way. Also, she was sorry now that she had even dared to bring up the subject, for surely it would cause trouble between them.

"It must've been pretty darned important, Nadalee, or you wouldn't bother me when I'm reading the Bible," he insisted. "Now tell me, why do you want to know if I like Mr. Blackwell?"

"Honestly, honey, we can talk about it when we go to bed," the beautiful young redhead said soothingly, trying to appease him with a weak smile of assurance.

"Nadalee, I want to know right now what made you ask me that question!" he demanded, his handsome face clouding with frustration and anger.

"Well, he... Mr. Blackwell... he was... looking at me today," she finally said stumblingly, her enthusiasm to share this shocking knowledge with her husband suddenly fading away. She knew that, unless she could come up with a watered-down version of what had happened, he would prod her until she blurted out the whole sordid truth about their employer's behavior that day.

"You just don't make any sense," Newton grumbled. "What's my opinion of the man have to do with his looking at you? What's come over you? You've been actin' like the devil's got you ever since we came up here to work."

"Please, I just wanted to know if you like him," she said, her eyes filling with tears and her slim shoulders clenching inward as she made a huge effort to fight down the emotion that would betray her into telling the whole story.

"All right, sure, I like him. Why shouldn't I? He's a fine man with a good heart and he brought us here to pay good money for honest work. Lord willing, he's our big chance to get that farm and settle down to live like honest people should."

"But Newton, don't get mad at me," Nadalee pleaded with a choked sob. "Can't you see that I was only teasing you-I just wanted to see if you'd be jealous of him. I know you admire him and I was only... only teasing... I'm sorry I said he was looking at me! I'm sorry I said anything at all!"

"You should be!" the brunette husband accused. "This is a funny time... after dinner this way... to be pullin' silly little girl stunts like that." With his last remark, the tall slender young man hung his head for a moment and mumbled a brief prayer, then rose and closed the Sacred Book.

She watched him walk grimly across the living room floor and reverently place the Bible next to the large photograph of his mother and father on top of a cabinet, then turn on his heel to stride briskly away without a word toward the rear of the cottage. She was alone now, more than ever alone, and an overwhelming feeling of miserable desolation swept over her.

Lord, how she wished she had kept her mouth shut about the incident that afternoon! She should have realized that Newton would never listen to anything that seemed to threaten their jobs here at Quail Lake... their "big chance to get that farm" someday. It was almost funny, now that she thought of it, for maybe she had been teasing her husband a little by daring to mention that their harsh-faced employer had stared at her that day. Maybe she had actually wanted to see if Newton's puritanical approach to sex was strong enough to make him want to protect his own wife from the lewd gazes of an older man-even though any show of indignation on his part might well cause George Blackwell to fire them both. Well, now she knew, she smiled bitterly, but still, it was impossible for her to wiggle out of the untenable position she had put herself in by changing her story at the last minute and not truthfully saying what had happened in Mr. Blackwell's study... what awful things he had said to her.

For the first time that evening, she pictured again the lurid spectacle of her employer's hardened shaft in his trouser crotch. Then, without warning, an unwanted tingle of sensation fluttered in her stomach as she remembered the wide spreading stain of wetness that she had seen at the tip of his penis where it had strained under the woolen fabric. It caused her to think back to one night when Newton was still courting her. They had been to a potluck dinner at his church and had been sitting quietly in his beat-up old jalopy, parked in front of her parents' house on Taylor Street. It had been summer and they had listened to the crickets chirping as they held hands, very much in love. Suddenly, the good-looking brunette boy had reached over and thrown his arms around her, jerking her to him and kissing her hard, his tongue actually slipping between her lips to touch hers. His breath had been warm and clean and she had felt his hands start to play lightly down from her sun-tanned shoulders to her chest. Then he had reached for one of her breasts and found his way under her blouse and then under her bra. It had been terribly exciting, as if the soft flesh had been given miraculous life in a second. His hand had been hot and firm, her nipple pulsing in his palm, and she had begun to quiver and make small sounds far back in her throat.

Newton had mistaken her sensual arousal for whimpers of protest, though, and had swiftly withdrawn his hand to sit with his head hanging down in shame. He had spent almost an hour apologizing to her, begging her forgiveness and promising never again to stray from the strict moral values that his parents had drilled into him. And she had tried to console him, saying that it was just as much her fault as his... Nevertheless, he had carried the burden of his guilt around with him for almost a year, had even seen her less for awhile, until eventually the horror of the liberty he had taken with her cooled in his mind.

They had been married a year later, two days after her seventeenth birthday, and then her suffering had really begun. On their wedding night she had felt free to give herself to him completely and had wanted to please him as much as she could with her inexperienced body. At first it had been wonderful to be all naked and cozy together in the warmth of their honeymoon bed and he had stroked her with his hands, roving them maddeningly over the full length of her body, over her flat white stomach and then on down to the auburn softness of her pubic hair. He had stroked her there slowly, gently insinuating his middle finger between the moist, never-before-entered lips of her vagina. It had started a thrilling prickling feeling in her that she had never known before and she had squirmed around on the mattress beneath his probings. Then she had unexpectedly felt a blunt fleshy pressure digging against the top of her thigh, gouging demandingly into the tender sensitive skin there, hurting her a little but not enough to make her object and risk losing the waves of sensuality it made in her.

It had been his penis!

She had never actually felt its nakedness against her own naked flesh and the muscles of her body had contracted involuntarily at the strange touch. A rippling shock of electric pleasure had gone racing through her as he inserted his finger deeper and she had been literally unable to move. Then, Newton had taken her closest hand to place it over his rigidity, gasping as he felt her fingers clenching around him. She had never dreamed that it would be so enormous, even though she had seen its swollen length beneath his trousers that night in the car, the same stain of wetness on his pants that she had seen just that afternoon on George Blackwell's pants in the upstairs study.

At last Newton had rolled over on top of her and placed his penis between her thighs, reaching down with one hand to guide the tip up into the tiny, virginal opening of her throbbing wet vaginal passage. After the initial pain of entry, she remembered that nothing in the world had ever made her feel so good, so complete, so utterly female and worthwhile. They had tossed and moaned for what seemed ages, until eventually he had groaned louder and she felt, a hot, thick stream of liquid spurt up inside her stomach, filling her so much that it had flowed out again and drenched the sparsely growing curls of her pubic hair, covering the insides of her thighs with its slippery wetness and dripping down to moisten the sheet beneath her buttocks. He had given out a final groan and then collapsed over her body, mumbling abject apologies into her ear for having brought them to what he said was a low, indecent level of unholy lust.