"You don't intend to rape me?" Her voice was accusing.
"No."
Llona thought about it. "I don't believe you," she decided. "You look like a desperate, animalistic, trapped rapist. Even your eyes are red with lust."
"They're just bloodshot because I've been drinking and I didn't get enough sleep last night and this morning I had a very rough time with-"
"Just the fact that you're here, watching me get undressed, lusting after my naked body, proves that you must be a rapist," Llona interrupted.
"I tell you I have no intention of raping you."
"Is that so? Well, we'll just see!" Llona opened her mouth very wide. "HEL-" she started to scream.
Quickly Archer closed his hand over mouth and cut off the scream. But it had attracted someone to the bedroom, and he quickly closed the closet door so that he and Llona and the compromising scene he knew they must present would not be seen. There was still enough light from the keyhole so he could see her brown eyes. They looked back at him with a womanly, "I-told-you-so-I-was-right-all-along" sort of smugness.
"Will you be quiet?" Archer whispered.
When she nodded, he removed his hand from her mouth. "If you're not going to rape me, then why are you holding me here?" she asked in a tone of voice which matched the message her eyes had conveyed.
"Because I don't want us to be found like this," Archer whispered back. "I know damn well how it will look to anybody who stumbles on us."
"Aren't you afraid I'll double-cross you and scream anyway?" she murmured in his ear.
"You'll be sorry if you do," Archer warned her. But he knew that his heart wasn't in the threat.
"Ooh! What would you do to me?"
"If you scream, I damn well will rape you!"
"RA-"
Archer quickly covered her mouth again. "I think you want to be raped!" he said accusingly.
She wriggled her body insinuatingly against his and muttered something he couldn't understand.
"What?" He loosened his fingers over her mouth cautiously.
"I said I believe in being fatalistic like Confucius."
"Confucius?"
"Yes, Confucius say: 'If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.' " Llona's body was a hot torch writhing against him.
"But I told you. I don't want to rape you!"
"The evidence says otherwise." Her hand slipped up his thigh and closed on target to prove her point.
There was the sound of footsteps outside the closet. Archer held his hand over her mouth. She didn't try to scream, or even to talk. He was afraid to talk himself, frightened of being overheard. So they were both quiet now. But their bodies were communicating volumes.
In reaching down to remove her hand, Archer had been ambushed. Like some magnetic vise, her thighs had entrapped his hand, the muscles contracting to grasp it and hold it imprisoned in the hollow just beneath the juncture of her legs. Archer had opened his mouth to chance a whispered protest, but she had denied him the opportunity by filling it with as much of her quick-breathing left breast as could be stuffed between his lips. Her tongue in his ears affected him so that she had to loosen the fist she'd made in order to encompass its swelling prisoner.
Right about then Archer became a convert to Confucianism. His free hand closed over one of Llona's fiery buttocks and encouraged the rotary movement upon which both buttocks had embarked. His other hand felt the hot dampness of her passion and wriggled upward to investigate the source. His lips became active, and his tongue began to duel with the hard, long, erect nipple she'd inserted in his mouth.
Llona's fingers released their grip and searched upward until she found the belt encircling his waist. She undid the belt and pulled down the zipper of his pants. A moment later her fist re-encircled him directly, with no garments to hamper its rhythmic caress. Her lips fastened over his as her urgings caused him to pull away from her breast to meet them, and her mouth was a narrow well of honey goading him to deeper and deeper tongue-sips.
Using both hands now, Archer scrambled atop Llona, prying her thighs apart and investigating her eagerly quivering nether-well. Her legs stretched straight up in the air and the ankles locked around his neck. Her hands held them there as he plunged his sword full length into the scabbard of her passion.
They both moved unthinkingly then in a wild, savage, timeless rhythm that carried them beyond mere feeling to pure sensation. Higher and higher they traveled, pushing to the limits of their physical strength, beyond thought, beyond the world and the universe to Heaven itself. And they pulled down the pearly gates with a mutual explosion that splattered them with angel fluff and finally sent their weary bodies careening down to the Earth below, to the floor of the walk-in closet, to the postcoital reality which it would take them a full moment to grasp.
Llona recovered first. "Wow!" she exclaimed. In the dim light from the keyhole, her eyes were brimming over with the glory of the experience.
"Wow!" Archer agreed. Then a dim remembrance of something which had flitted across his consciousness while they were making love prompted him to phrase a question. "Why didn't you tell me you were a virgin?" he asked Llona.
"It seemed a futile sort of objection to make to a rapist. It wouldn't have stopped you, would it?"
"You mean it wouldn't have stopped you." Archer chuckled. "And it didn't."
"That's not very gallant. "You must be from the groom's side of the family," Llona decided.
"I am. Mortimer's my cousin."
"Who?"
"Mortimer. The groom."
"The bridegroom's name isn't Mortimer," Llona said positively. "It's George."
"George? But then I must be at the wrong wedding reception. Are you sure?"
"I should be," Llona assured him. "I'm the bride!"
Сhapter Two
"Owwweeee! OH! OH! OH! IIIYEEEOWWW!"
George Rutherford bayed with the sudden pain. And well he might have. It was agony! It took a full moment before he was able to calm himself. Only then did he stop howling and start cursing his luck.
He never should have been in such a damn-fool hurry. Yanking his zipper like that! It was fortunate he hadn't castrated himself!
George investigated the damage. It was slight. Only the redness of the bruise and a little scraped skin. Still, it was a hell of a thing to happen to a man just before his wedding night! Little did George guess that before the night was over a far worse fate would befall him. Nor, as he glowered at the zipper and damned it for betraying him, did George suspect that a far worse betrayal was being perpetrated upon him by his bride in the very next room!
But then such a suspicion would never have crossed George's mind. Naivete was a major personality trait where George Rutherford was concerned. Besides which, he was so dazed by Llona Mayper's having finally agreed to marry him that it never occurred to him to question why her attitude toward him had undergone such an abrupt about-face.
Only a few months before Llona had been so opposed to becoming George's wife that she'd run away from home to avoid it. Her flight had left George in a peculiar position at that time. Peculiar because of the circumstances which had led up to the prospect of marriage in the first place.
George Rutherford had started lusting after Llona Mayper during their second year together in Birchville High School. By the time they'd both graduated, their twice-a-week wrestling matches in the front seat of George's second-hand Volkswagen had settled into a routine expected and accepted by both of them. As a matter of course, after some heavy petting, George would slide his hand up under Llona's skirt. As a matter course, Llona would let it graze there for a brief moment and then remove it. As a matter of course, that was where Llona always drew the line.
Then one night George had gone to call on Llona at her home. Her parents were out for the evening. George had followed his usual routine. But to his surprise Llona hadn't stopped him that night. Instead, she had urged him to go further and further. At the last minute it was George himself who balked.