No Controlling Legal Authority Ch. 24

"Hush now, shorty. It's OK; men like their women to be a little raunchy, especially if they think the raunchiness is only for them," she whispered with a knowing grin, and pushed the chatty image into the back of her mind.

"Holy Cow," Caleb exclaimed as he burst into the car and slammed the door behind him. "It's turned colder that a grave digger's butt out there; I wouldn't be surprised if this rain doesn't turn to snow before morning."

"Here, you're all wet," she observed solicitously, handing him a handkerchief that she had taken from her purse while he was outside.

He wiped his face and neck, glancing at her sheepishly from time to time, as he dried himself, and she opened her compact and pretended to busy herself applying fresh lipstick. She caught him, of course, felt him, actually, peeping at her legs around the edges of her handkerchief, and she had to struggle to keep from smiling at her reflection in the compact. She crossed her legs and felt her skirt rise an inch or so up her thigh. It was a trick she had learned in college, crossing and uncrossing her legs, using them to raise her skirt like hoisting a flag up a pole, as it were, until somebody saluted. She was careful not to overdo it, and surreptitiously checked to be certain that the important places remained hidden in the shadows under her skirt. It suited her purposes perfectly; her skirt stopped a couple of inches shy of exposing her totally, and, she thought, it was just risqué enough without being slutty. It was, she calculated, exactly the sort of dishabille an excited girl with much to distract her might let pass unnoticed.

"Here, thanks," he muttered, returning her handkerchief. His shirt was nearly soaked through and clung to him across his shoulders. He had accomplished little by running his fingers through his hair, and damp, wind-blown strands still drifted across his forehead, making him look like a schoolboy just in from recess.

"You're a mess," she laughed, snapping her compact shut and taking the handkerchief from him. "Come here, and let me fix you."

He looked at her ruefully and leaned toward her. She reached across the empty space between them and brushed his hair off his forehead and temples with the tips of her fingers. It was just a gesture really, because her fingers were no better at combing unruly, wet hair than his, but her touch was light and gentle, almost motherly, and it moved him. Perhaps, at that moment, her touch was only a clever counterpoint, designed to accentuate the sensuous display of her legs, but in his mind it balanced with the impressions of wantonness Moon Dog's report had left him with, and the juxtaposition of those qualities, sexiness and tenderness, made her seem complete to him in a way no other woman had been before. He froze for a moment, luxuriating in the casual caress of her fingertips across his brow, and his features softened.

"There, that's the best I can do without a comb and a pair of scissors," she said withdrawing her hand.

"Do I need a haircut?" he asked self-consciously and tried to catch his reflection in the rear view mirror.

"Not really, you look good with your hair a little long over the ears, but your hair stylist ought to pay more attention to keeping the lengths even."

"Hair stylist?" he responded with the uneasy grin of someone with a freshly unmasked deficiency. "That would be old 'Pellet-Head Posey' down at the 'Crop-a-Top' barbershop."

"'Pellet-Head?'" she snickered.

"Bird-shot pellets; when Pellet-Head was about fifteen, Seth Verhoven caught him one night, stealing watermelons from the patch behind his barn and peppered his backside pretty good. Pellet-Head went straight not long after that. He's been barbering now going on fifty years and still gives a pretty good haircut, or so I thought until now."

"It looks nice, really," she assured him, giving his hair a second, closer inspection.

"They don't go in for a lot of that fancy stuff down at the 'Crop-a-Top,' he said a little defensively while she looked him over.

"Who'da guessed, with a name like that?" she laughed lightheartedly.

"Pellet-Head's been cutting my hair all my life, except, of course, when I was away at school," he explained. "Every six weeks, I go in and he cuts it; he even stays open late just for me, so I don't have to wait and listen to his customers critique my decisions."

"I wouldn't change, either, under those circumstances," she agreed.

"And, after he finishes and closes up, I drive him home."

"How come?"

"'Cause, he's half blind and can't drive anymore."

"There's a clue," she chuckled. "Tell you what, Caleb, next time, after you drop him off, you come see me and I'll trim you up. By the time you go back, it'll have grown out, and he'll never know."

"You can cut hair?" he asked with a note of surprise.

"That's one of my talents; it's one of the things I was supposed to do for the kids at the Caruthers' Home. I got pretty good at that, too," she said ambiguously, while she read his face for reaction.

"Oh," he muttered as though the mention of the Caruthers' Home had caused him to recall some unpleasantness from the past, which, of course, in a way, it had.

The words from Moon Dog's report, like criminals brought to the dock for examination, were summonsed into his brain by the utterance of the name. Those words, the ones that he had churned in his mind as though making whey into butter, poured into his thoughts. Mental pictures of her, and them, doing things, drawn by those words on the pages of his mind, cast a provocative spell and captivated him. His mouth went dry, and his head suddenly felt light. He gripped the wheel for stability, and fought the impulse to look at her, but the images were too powerful and too compelling to resist. His eyes drifted to her knees and up, along the supple lines of her bared thighs to the shadowy space beneath her skirt, and the demons of his knowledge played havoc with his imagination.

"But, I guess you know all about that," she said in a low voice that was excruciatingly burdened with implication, and she turned her head to look away allowing his fantasies to take him where they would.

He nearly forgot her presence as his eyes crept across her lines and curves, and, while she feigned indifference, he colored the vague sketches his imagination had fashioned from Moon Dog's words with the rich, vibrant colors of reality. Spectral images gathered shape and took form as he connected the woman with the incendiary words, and he attempted to close his eyes to savor the memories, but he could not because her shadows held him between her thighs. His heart raced, and the pounding rush of his pulse chased the chill from his limbs.

The seconds ticked into minutes as they meandered along separate paths for a while, and the silence was broken only by the pattering sound of rain on the roof and his labored breathing. She sat expectantly, but still as stone, gazing into the opaque nothingness of the fogged window and tried to anticipate the course of things.

"Uh, ah," he coughed, waking from his trance, finally, when his mind reached the end of Moon Dog's report. "It's late; we probably should get going."

She turned toward him slowly, as though she had seen in the glass a glimpse of her future that had pleased her and she was reluctant to relinquish the vision. For an instant the air inside the car crackled with excited energy like the molecules had become agitated, and he had an unsettling premonition that lightening was about to strike the car.

"You're the driver, Caleb," she whispered softly; "Do whatever you think is best."

"Yeah, right," he said, wiping his lips with the back of his wrist once or twice, and then, he reached for the ignition and started the motor.

"I'll drive for a while, if you're tired," she volunteered, accepting his decision without outward sign of disappointment. "I've been through here a hundred times."

"I'm OK," he replied. "I like to drive; it gives me something to do while I'm in the car."

"Have a go, then, by all means," she sighed and arched an eyebrow in his direction, but he was busily steering the car onto the roadway and escaped the irony.

Immediately, the night, the rain and the forest swallowed them. The road followed an old wagon track that wound through the hills along side a small stream. The car swayed gently through the tight curves, and a steady, light rain beat softly on the roof overhead. She observed him drive for a while to satisfy herself that his skills, or lack of them, weren't putting her in danger, and then, she yawned, because she hadn't slept much after fleeing Hardwick School.

"You must be worn out," he observed, when she yawned again. "Why don't you get some sleep?"

"I hate to sleep and leave you to drive alone on a night like this," she answered, nodding toward the patter of rain that collected on the windshield between wiper swipes.

"I'll be fine," he assured her. "I don't need much sleep to keep going, and, besides, since you were right about the lack of traffic, driving is a piece of cake. All I have to do is keep the speed down to thirty or less and the car does all the work."

"Are you sure?" she questioned hopefully, but she had already accepted his offer and was turning so she could lean her head against the door. "I didn't realize I was so exhausted," she continued apologetically.

"I don't know how you managed to keep going this long," he said, acknowledging the rigors of the preceding days.

"You just don't know Cletus and Nadeen, Caleb, and I hope you never meet them, but having them hunting for me sort of made sleep irrelevant," she said, omitting the Caruthers' sir name on the assumption he knew all about them.

"That's over, Anne; you're with me, now, and you're safe. They can't hurt you here," he said gravely, in a tone of voice that made him sound like the King of England granting safe passage through his realm.

"I know; my first chance to relax in days," she replied wearily, omitting his title, thus narrowly avoiding, in her fatigue, the opportunity to prick his vanity again. "I guess that's why I'm so tired all of a sudden."

"Sleep then; you need it," he answered decisively. "I don't have a blanket, but there's a jacket in the back seat if you want something to cover up with."

"I'm fine, thanks," she said in a sleepy voice as she leaned her head against the window. "Just wake me when we get to Ironton; it's about an hour ahead."

"We'll see," he said softly, but she was already asleep and didn't hear him.

It was a narcotic night, with the rain, the monotonous metronome ticking of the wipers, the warmth and the gentle rocking of the car on the dark, deserted road, and she drifted into a light, uneasy sleep. He drove through the darkness, allowing her to doze undisturbed, and passed through Ironton without slowing. She stirred briefly when the lights of the town slipped quietly past, but she was still asleep as they reentered the forest on the southeast edge of town.

She was a light sleeper, had been since her days as a resident of the Caruthers' Children's Home for Orphans, because it was difficult to sleep soundly in a house full of boys with no locks on the doors, so she had learned to sleep with one eye open. Not long past Ironton, the rain lessened, and the road straightened some. The hills were lower and the curves fewer, with almost no hairpin turns or switchbacks. The gentle rocking of the car smoothed for long intervals, and she subconsciously sensed the changes. She stirred in her sleep, not fully awakened, but felt an aching in her legs of the sort that results from maintaining a static position too long. She sighed softly and shifted her legs toward Caleb, so her knees were pointed at him and her feet were tucked under the seat beneath her. In the sweet intoxication of exhausted sleep, she lost track of her hemline, and, as she moved, her skirt crept up her shapely thighs to an alluring height. The glow from the dash lights fell along the full length of her legs, giving a soft, glossy sheen to her smooth, well-tanned skin from her knees almost to the very tops of her thighs and the shadow flirted with her modesty with every somnolent breath she took

Her mind floated in the hazy, semiconscious zone between slumber and wakefulness, riding the gentle swells of her dreams as they rolled through her sleep. Random scraps of reality wove themselves on the loom of her subconscious and became a part of the tapestry of her rest. Dimly, images from the Caruthers' Home took shape; the soft cushion of the car seat beneath her became the mattress on her bed, the cold, unyielding pillow of the window against which her head rested became the inflexible iron headboard of her narrow cot and the soft plop of the wipers suggested the nearly silent footfalls of little boys creeping through the lonely night toward the comfort of her arms. Light and shadow played across the closed lids of her eyes giving form to invisible figures and prescient dreams foretold the feathery touch of timid caresses.

Awareness rose like a slowly ascending bubble, and gradually she replaced the indistinct symbols in her dreams with the sounds and smells of her surroundings, until all that remained unexplained were the shadows that wavered tentatively across her lids. Surreptitiously, for she had learned that timid boys tend to be frightened away by abrupt awakenings, she opened her eyes a fraction and surveyed the cabin through undetectably tiny slits.

Nothing moved, nothing was changed, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary to her sleepy inspection. The headlights still cast steady beams into the night ahead, and the dash lights still glowed evenly, infusing the cabin and its occupants with warm, unwavering light. Caleb sat across the seat from her, calm and innocent, staring into the night ahead while the wheel slipped easily through his relaxed fingers. She was about to dismiss her premonition as imagination and announce her wakefulness with a yawn and a stretch, when she sensed his eyes turning toward her and she froze.

His hand rose from the wheel and floated, fingers extended, in the empty space in front of the dash. She thought for a moment that he was about to turn on the radio or adjust the temperature, but she quickly realized that he wasn't touching any of those controls. Puzzled, she studied his fingers, trying to divine a purpose in their movements, and pretended to sleep.

He extended the forefinger on his floating hand and with great deliberation described a tight circle in the empty air. Then, he drew another circle atop the first, followed by another, and another, and then, he moved his hand a few inches and layered another set of phantom circles in the blank space before the dash, and her mystification was nearly complete.

She studied his movements and let her imagination suggest a purpose. Marcel Marceau and crop circle design came to mind but no explanation seemed to click. Her curiosity was compelling, so she quickly found herself on the brink of blurting out her question, but, as her eyes drifted down to the front of her blouse, she swallowed her words with a quick gulp and disguised a startled jerk with a sleepy sigh.

The shadow of his finger was tracing a dark circle in the sheer fabric covering her breast. The cloth was drawn tight across her rounded curves, and her nipples, responding to her dreams, had hardened. The twin prominences capped her breasts and projected themselves as dark points through the revealing fabric.

She watched in fascination as a feathery shadow circumscribed first one nipple and then, the other, and then, reversing itself, repeated the process. In an astonishing response to suggestion, her flesh tightened under his phantom caress, and she felt a puckering sensation in her breasts. Then, his hand spread like a mouth opening, and the curved shadow of his thumb and fingers cupped her bosom. She watched as the shadows pressed her breast from top and bottom and slowly closed, converging on her throbbing nipple like the teeth of a closing pincer. She lifted her eyes from her breast and glanced toward his hand just as he extended his forefinger and flicked it three or four times and she could almost feel its shadow tripping across her nipples. Amazingly, she found the pantomimed foreplay to be excruciatingly erotic, and it took all the will power she could muster to feign sleep and mask her responsiveness.

His hand drifted from her breasts for a moment, and she felt a quick pang of abandonment, but then his shadow fingers were splayed across her thigh and her loins were tightening in anticipation. He toyed with her, oblivious to her observation, and touched her with his shadows where he willed. Shadows, short and stubby because his hand hovered just inches above her legs, sought the deep cleavage between her thighs, and she prayed for the strength to resist the urge to open her thighs for his touch. He lifted his hand closer to the light source on the dash, and the shadows lengthened; long, slender, probing shadows slithered up her thighs to pluck at the hem of her skirt where it barely hid her pussy. She felt flooding warmth that slickened her lips, and she wondered if he could detect the scent of her growing arousal.

She teased him with a restless sigh and a squirm that inched her hem to the very verge of the golden triangle between her legs. His shadow finger, elongated and pointed, sniffed up her thigh like an ethereal prick on the prowl for pussy, and she could feel the heat of a blush creeping up her neck as the shadow probed toward the junction of her thighs. The weight of his shadow pressed heavily into her springy exposed hair and her lips quivered with an intense longing to be pierced by his phantom phallus.

She could not tear her eyes from the wicked, shadowy phalanges between her legs that mimed his lust with undeniable imagery, but she didn't need to look at him to know his eyes were on her body. She felt his gaze on her generous curves and sultry surfaces and sensed his rapture in the rising warmth in her loins. Under the semblance of sleep, she relaxed her legs and let her thighs separate, goading him with an indecent glimpse of her sex, and she heard the sharp intake of breath as he gasped at the revelation.

She closed her eyes and waited for the caress she was sure to come. Her thighs throbbed with her excitement and the suspense of uncertain anticipation. The shadows were a palpable presence, merging with her fantasies in the silkiness of her skin. She held her breath and felt on her exquisitely sensitive inner thigh the heat from his hovering hand. He was close; she knew it in her soul. His fingers reached for her, stretching toward her mons with childlike inquisitiveness; and the pendency of his caress overwhelmed her with desire. Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought with her fists to resist the compulsion to grab his hand and direct him into her wetness. She cloaked her emotions with the serenity of sleep, while, inwardly, her loins boiled with the roily, hot lava of her lust.

She waited for him to make his move, and the breathless seconds hung endlessly in the silence. Her heartbeat thumped in her throat, and she offered up a prayer to Eros to instill in him the courage to pursue his dreams. She willed his fingers into her sullied silk and steadied herself to receive his touch. She plotted against her impatience with a plan to accept his caresses under the guise of increasingly disquieted sleep, until he embraced the conviction that her fatigue was about to succumb to desire, and only then to awaken with his fingers deep inside her and her will far past the point of effective resistance. His fingertip brushed her thigh burning her like the hot tongue of a brazing torch on her skin, and her plan, foolish and fragile from its inception, began to fragment. His fingers skidded across the tender flesh inside her thighs, where the skin is smooth and soft and requires no lubrication to ease the passage of a gentle caress and she felt the impending explosion of an exclamation on her lips. As his fingers crept upward, an "Oh" rushed from her gut on an expanding burst of wind that was destined to coincide with his arrival at the portal to her heaven. "Oh please," she prayed for nothing, to no one as his fingers dawdled, and then, suddenly, without warning, the hideous, roaring clatter of flying gravel striking sheet metal shattered the brimming goblet of her expectation.