David Dun - Necessary Evil

Putting her hands on his bare chest, she urged him onto the bed, where he leaned back against the pile of pillows along the old mahogany headboard. His fingers interlaced with hers, and in that touching she felt his reverence of her and what they were doing. Moving over him, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck; putting her lips to his ear, she let him feel the heat of her breath.

After a time, she released him and sat back on his thighs. Her breasts were the size of apples but more conical than rounded, high and firm, never having nursed a child. Her nipples, a pastel of brown and pink, stiffened with desire.

Around her neck, the golden hue to her skin contrasted with the starker whiteness around her breasts. Kier drank in the sight of her, his breath catching at the excitement shining in her eyes. The swell of each breast in his lips, the eagerness in her body, her smell, her nakedness.

When Kier used his tongue to feel the texture of her aureola, she shivered and pulled his lips hard on her. He began to lick her, tasting the sweat from the hollow between her breasts. With rhythmic strokes of his soft tongue, he drew from her an urgent moan. She arched herself backward, rising up on her knees. Her long fingers, buried in his hair, pulled at him while his hand gently traced up her leg to the edge of her panties, where he let a finger slip beneath. Jessie's deep breaths told him that the slightest caress would bring her to the edge.

Her body became a telegraph, and Kier the recipient of each nuanced message. Touching Jessie's smooth-skinned back like butterflies kissing the wind, he felt her body coiling around him, the flex of her thighs. Soon he could feel her determined desire, the increased strength of her grip, the arch of her spine pressing his face to her chest. Together they stripped off her panties.

Her triangle was silken and dark, matted down so that it seemed close cropped. Like the rest of her, it struck him as petite. He cupped her face and kissed her fiercely, marrying his tongue to hers, exploring its edges, then its underside. Her legs wrapped like vines around his and he felt the urgency of her pelvis pressing against his thigh.

"I want you," he said simply, looking into her eyes.

Sensing what he wanted, she abandoned herself to his touches and the sweet words murmured over her.

"You are more than I ever conceived, more than I dreamed about," he whispered in her ear.

He put one hand on her bottom, bringing her up on her knees and with the other, he sent feathery-light touches between her legs, setting her to groaning shudders. Then the little touches changed. Around and around his fingers moved, never quite letting her reach the peak of her frenzy, making her crazy with anticipation. A buzzing began in her lower back, then spread up and over her shoulders.

Her fingers dug into the heavy muscle of his arms as she guided him into her. She put her hand down to his and pressed his fingers to her, moving them in a secret rhythm, teaching him. Her breathing now came deep and regular, like an athlete hitting her stride. She rode him on a sheen of sweat that made their thighs buttery slick. After a time a trembling began in her, an ache with the rhythmic squeezing of her legs around his middle. The sweet sensation caused her entire body to cling to him, as if by squeezing tight she might find release.

As she reached for the culmination of her pleasure, her breaths grew ragged again, sounding to her own ear like great gulps of life. Her lovemaking was pure, unfettered by any weight of guilt or worry-she gave herself to it and to him completely. Without a promise or a vow, he had somehow filled her with trust.

In the clenching of her legs he could feel a building rhythm and her pleasant desperation.

She pushed her pelvis even harder into his caressing fingers, clinging to his head as if it were her savior in a storm.

"Please," she said.

Feeling her rush, the wild thrusting of her hips, he pressed on until she screamed her solace, then groaned in satisfaction.

When her breathing had quieted, she lay like a rag against him. She played a little game, squeezing down on him, then giggled when, with his own flexions, he signaled back.

"What are we going to do with this now that I'm spent?"

"Spend you again," he whispered in reply.

Leaning back, she gave a wicked little smile, and Kier covered her lips and neck with gentle kisses until the deeper kisses began again to seem intriguing. After that, she thought of nothing but the pleasure of his tongue on hers, and marveled at the escalating stirring in her loins. While she giggled, he kissed her body endlessly. Patiently, his tongue made long, slow strokes everywhere, as if it had lost its way. Her desire was a tiny cloud over a parched desert, and that cloud grew with the heat of the day until it rained great droplets of relief.

After, when she was floating high above mere physical wanting on the rising currents of her contentment, after her thighs were loosened and as much in love with him as the rest of her, she held him very close as he climaxed in shudders that lasted like August heat into Indian summer.

It was just before she drifted off to sleep that something her mother had once said shot into her mind. She stirred and repositioned herself atop his body.

"What?" he whispered, making her smile.

"What?"

"You're thinking something."

"Hmmm. That old Tilok instinct that saved our lives. Well, I'll tell you what. My mother used to say that sanity lies on the far side of an erection. So now that we're sane, where are we?"

He couldn't answer.

Adrenaline fueled her racing heart as Jessie glanced around the thicket where she and Kier had hidden themselves. Looking and listening for the men who hunted them, she strained all her senses. Kier remained still and peered through his stolen field glasses around the pasture at the Donahues' farm. His calm, she knew, was like the eye of a hurricane-never far from the turbulence of the engine that powers it. She was certain that not a minute passed when he didn't think of his mother, wondering if she was tied up in Claudie's house.

Starting at eleven p.m., Kier and Jessie had recrossed the ridge and walked briskly for five hours, most of it sideways and downhill along the mountain, covering a great distance in relatively little time. As Kier had predicted, the heavy rains of the warm storm had melted the snow at the lower altitudes, leaving the ground and vegetation sodden and thus quiet underfoot. Water dripped steadily through leaves and branches, a percussion that disguised the sounds of their passage.

The Donahue house was perched against the mountain on a slight rise that overlooked a tree-ringed pasture that ran like a widening funnel down the hill. Jessie guessed that they sat behind the several huckleberry plants some two hundred yards from the house.

Kier dropped one hand so that she could mesh her fingers with his. After twenty minutes of quiet observation, they had seen nothing except shadows moving against the curtains inside the house. They were not expected for another twenty-nine hours. Most of the men were probably still combing the mountain for their track.

According to Kier, at 5,800 feet, Elk Horn Pass was high enough that it would still be plugged with snow unless the largest plows had cleared the way. He suspected that Tillman had by now a stranglehold on access to the valley. The snow would be a perfect excuse to keep people out. Assistance, they decided, was unlikely.

Kier dropped the binoculars and turned to her. His hand went to her cheek; his eyes, she knew, were pleading.