When the men were finished with her, Jill lay alone on the hard stone, delirious from the cumming and the endless use. She awakened to the morning feeling abandoned by the world. Every limb ached and her crotch felt as if it were twice its normal size. She looked into the emptiness around her and wondered where the women were. It was difficult to see in the flat grainy gray of dawn.
“What a pretty sacrifice.” Someone was stroking her brow. She turned her head, and her eyes opened on Nirvana. “And a good sacrifice you were. I could tell, Ariana could tell, Regalia could tell. Well . . . all decided. Normally we don’t choose a novice for our morning ritual, but we were certain that you wouldn’t mind, my sweet sister. Was it so bad?”
“You do this every morning?” Jill had the presence of mind to ask.
“Of course. Can you think of a better way to greet the day than with the sacrifice of a female harlot? We don’t have guts enough to engage in a real sacrifice to the death, but I think this sort has its own merits. After all, you get to walk away!” She laughed.
Did they really, seriously, consider sacrificing to the death? How far would these heathens go? A flutter of fear traipsed stealthily through her body and then moved on quickly as Nirvana helped her to her feet. Of course, the woman wasn’t serious! She scoffed at her silly fear, while at the same time wondering if it was silly at all.
The women took her to the river where they bathed away the remnants of the night, and playfully greeted the day with a rising quotient of teasing slaps and giggles that signaled the day ahead.
Jill was nearly into the spirit of merriment again, wondering how her second day at the country pleasure fair would go. But as the women returned to the camp, having reached the crest of the hill where the fair had been, Jill was disappointed to see that the men were taking down the tents.
“It’s over?”
“For his year, yes,” Nirvana answered sadly.
“Where do you go now?”
“Tomorrow we scatter to the winds. We go home.”
“Oh, dear.” She looked tired and bewildered.
“You have no place to go, do you?” the glib psychic Ariana noted.
“No, I really don’t. Johnny Gold left me here with you. I’d hoped, at least I think I’d hoped, to figure out what I wanted before the fair ended. But it’s all happened so quickly… I don’t…” There weren’t even words to describe her despair.
“But of course you’re going home with me,” Ariana solved the problem for her. “I certainly wouldn’t cast you to the wolves now, would I? And Regalia will be with us.”
“And where is home?”
“I own a pottery and crystal shop near Flagstaff. Beautiful country. If you’re making a new life for yourself, it’s a great place to do that.”
Jill spent the remainder of the day assuming that in the morning, she’d be packed up in Ariana’s old truck along with the woman’s other belongings and heading Southwest. She thought with some excitement about the vistas, the open spaces, and the chance to find a life in a new place where no cared who she had been before. That was until she heard the sound of motorcycles rising out of the valley. The closer they got, the more her heart started to beat with alarm. She could feel Johnny’s approach as if he were already hanging on her limbs like dead weight. The instant her ears relayed the truth, she knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere with Ariana. He’d come to tale her back.
As if trading in a claim ticket, he’d be taking her away and roaring off to God knows where—California, LA, she assumed, if he was sticking to his plan. Of course, she’d go with him. She never had any doubt about that. But why?
Was he more familiar, easier to understand, less threatening than the sweet-faced hedonists at the fair? Than Ariana? Young Regalia? Was the unknown trek he’d take her on less dangerous than the known destination of her earth mother friend? Was it just her fate to ride the back of Harley with her sex pressed to a man’s butt? Or was it just familiar and unchallenging? Easy. Simple. Submissive.
The pair stopped in Reno, where they gambled and lost two hundred bucks. Then they filled up with gas in Tahoe and started toward the mountain pass, crossing the border into California. Three days later, they crashed in a motel in Newport Beach.
With hardly a dime to her name, Jill decided it was time to get a job.
What would her life have been if she’d gone with Ariana? She’d think about the fair after a long day waitressing in a hole-in-the-wall café near the beach. From the deck of their motel, the ocean breezes soothed some of the ache. But was it any substitute for the peaceful vistas of the high desert and the calm of Ariana’s gentle ways? She sensed that by choosing Johnny Gold over the sensuous mistress of the arcane she’d altered her life in unknown ways, which only time would reveal.
She could see her future. One day would settle into next, a few months would go by and she’d forget the fair. Eventually, she and Johnny would move to an apartment as sad as the motel, but at least more permanent. Some distant day far beyond her now, she’d wonder how she managed to trap her life in another cage of aimless choices that nailed bars around her as secure as any jail cell.
Chapter Eight - Recovered Property
On the outskirts of Cold River Falls along the old highway sits a steakhouse, which has been in that location for over thirty years, a fixture in the area and about the only place, except for Nick’s Tavern, where strangers can consort without attracting undo attention.
The two men met at six p.m. sharp on a Wednesday evening, when there were few diners in the Cold River Steak House. Christopher Hurst was a fanatic for his privacy, so this particularly quiet evening suited him. Of course, he could have planned an even more anonymous location for the meeting in a nearby town where even fewer people would recognize his face. But, since the discussion would be brief and amicable, and certainly no one in Cold River Falls would know his dinner guest, further precautions to secure his privacy seemed unnecessary.
He hadn’t counted on Logan Dunn’s charisma to attract so much attention in the restaurant, especially with the women. Like mindless Barbie Dolls, all their pretty heads turned his way as the maitre’d led the man to the secluded table in the back of the room. Thankfully, once the two shook hands and settled in, the other diners seemed to lose interest in the pair and turned back to their dinner companions.
“So glad you agreed to meet me here. Saves me a lot of time,” Christopher opened the discussion with a pleasant, if not somewhat devious, smile.
“So long as you’re paying the bill, I’ll meet you anywhere you like.”
“Yes, of course. I took the liberty of ordering a couple of steaks. Hope you’re not a vegetarian.”
“No, I like my meat rare.”
“Good. I think you’ll be pleased enough, unless you have real gourmet tastes, which can’t be satisfied in this town.”
“I’m a country boy, Mr. Hurst. I’m sure anything here will suit me.”
He didn’t look like a country boy—he could have been a GQ model or a Rodeo cowboy, or an actor. Not that he was a pretty-boy—far from it. He was quietly assuming without being arrogant, and most intriguing. Perhaps what Christopher expected.
“A country boy?” he questioned the man, “I’m surprised. I never would have guessed.”
“I live in a cabin in the woods, keep to myself when I’m not working. And that’s the way I like my life.”
“But you do carry yourself with a certain panache. I suppose that’s necessary in your line of work?”
“Whatever I do is natural to me. Although it does take a degree of grit to do my job. That I will admit to. You have to be cold, calculating and vicious at times, especially when the runaways want to fight. But I’ve never lost. Eight years, and I’ve never lost one, and I’ve only failed to find two, out of probably… eighteen maybe nineteen.”
“Really? That few?”
“More or less. Sometimes it takes months to track these girls. And since the pay is so
generous, I don’t have to work that hard. Then too, there isn’t a big demand for my services. Sometimes months go by when all the closet sex slaves of wealthy men behave themselves and stay put like the good little sluts they are.”
His smirk was most engaging. His air light and joking, which put Christopher at ease. He’d probably like the man under other circumstances. But he felt the business at hand was too important to waste more time on small talk.
“About the girl,” he started.
“Yes, tell me about the girl.”
“What do you need to know?”
“Everything you can tell me. The nature of your relationship. What kind of formal contract you engaged in, legal or otherwise. Why you think she left. And then, of course, any pertinent information that would lead me to find her. Pictures, clothes, behavior patterns, education, the kind of people or places she would gravitate toward. Did she leave a note?”
He would have gone on, but Christopher interrupted him, pulling from his briefcase a fat manila envelope. “The pictures are in here.”
Logan started to open the package when Christopher urgently placed his hand on his.
“Not here.”
“Not here? There’s no one around.”
“Perhaps no one will see, but I have no intention of letting the locals here know anything about my relationship with Jillian. I doubt if anyone even knows that she’s gone.”
“Was she known in the area?”
“Only to a certain extent.”
“Friends?”
“No, not really. She would go into town on errands. I believe she was pleasant enough. But she was considered a loner and very much my…” he stumbled here, “my companion.”
“Companion? That’s all?”
“Of course, we were more than that and I’m sure there were many people who assumed that there was a sexual relationship. People talk, make the easy assumption.”
“So, there was no sexual relationship?”
“Oh, yes there was. Of course there was; our very private one, although by outward appearances we gave no one reason to believe that our relationship was anything but platonic. On the rare times we were together in town, I took the role of older brother rather than boyfriend. After all, technically, I was her stepfather. People simply assume when two people of our age live together that things are happening.”
Logan eyed him with carefully. “I see. So about the girl?”
“Yes, well, she’s the daughter of my former wife—who abandoned us both. I suppose it was a good thing she split, considering what developed after her mother left. Jillian and I were always close,” he sighed wistfully, “always seemed to fit together like we were made for each other. Of course, to begin with, she was a minor and I had to be prudent. Then a few years ago, after her mother left, and she were sure she was gone for good, the damn burst on all intense feelings we shared. It was pretty uncanny the way we discovered her little kinky side, her desire to be dominated, which fit right into my natural proclivities, if you get my drift.”
“Certainly.”
“I loved her, Mr. Dunn. She was my true slave—dutiful, adoring, and as you’ll see—very beautiful. I have taken the liberty of putting a few bondage poses in there,” he pointed to the package of photographs. “You’ll see the depth of her submission. I don’t think describing it in words does it justice. You are familiar with the extremes of S&M?”
Logan chuckled. “Very.”
The man spoke so passionately that he was tempted to believe him.
“In the last year, we entered into a formal contract. I was going to have her pierced and branded. I think she was a little reluctant there, but she did agree. And when we talked about it during sex, she’d get amazingly turned on. She kept wanting to go deeper, and I led her where she wanted to go, being surprised at every turn how willing she was to take on new risks.” The man sighed mournfully, as his thoughts rested on the missing Jillian.
“So, if she was so happy, why did she run away?” Logan interrupted him.
“We’d had a bit of a tiff about something simple, something we’d get over, certainly. I expected it to blow over. But then a young man arrived at the house,” he paused, seeming reluctant to continue, “Actually… he was my son, out of wedlock son. I was very young when he was conceived. Anyway, there was an ugly scene between us—Jillian had nothing to do with that. And then he left. That night Jillian was missing. At first, I didn’t connect the two events, since I didn’t think the two had even met while the boy was in my house. I thought initially that she just needed a little break—she’d done that in the past, gone off for a few hours, though not recently. It was only a few days later when she didn’t turn up that I linked her with my son, and decided that they might have, as impossible as it seems, gone off together.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t begin to believe the idea.
“Do you know if they left together?”
“No. Not really. But that might be a place to start.”
“And you know where you can find your son?”
“I’m not sure. We aren’t close at all. His life is miles apart from mine. He rides a Harley, takes part in those cross-country road races. I guess he’s made a name for himself, calls himself Johnny Gold. His real name is John Willis—his mother’s name. If you ask around the racing circuit, I’m sure you’ll find someone who knows where he is.”
Logan sat back digesting the information, looking guardedly at his client, his mind working with some diligence to understand the facts the man presented him.
“The real question, Mr. Hurst, is what’s going to happen when I find Jillian? How do I bring her back? What kind of legitimate claim can you make on her, if any? You say you were so close, but she did leave and hasn’t returned in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously, she doesn’t want to come back on her own. Whatever has happened since your ‘tiff’ and since she left has convinced her to remain a runaway.”
“That’s just it, I think she might have been brainwashed by my son. She’s very impressionable, and can hardly act on her own. You must have seen that with the other submissive women you’ve recovered. She probably thinks I won’t have her back. But I do want her.”
“And any legal means to apprehend her?”
Christopher’s mood suddenly changed in the perceptible ways Logan Dunn was used to seeing in his clients. Some were very cagey, others ruthless. He’d certainly seen this kind of transformation before. At the moment, Christopher Hurst was more cagey than merciless.
“Yes, sadly there are some matters of importance that concern me. She stole several valuable jewelry items and some cash. And we had a working contract, which she has breached. That’s in the package too. I hate to press legal charges, but if I have to, I will. It should be enough to retain her, legally. Do we need a warrant?”
“If possible. I prefer to work with one. That way I don’t have to go dodging the law; I simply make a legal arrest.”
“Well then, I have a friend, a judge.”
Logan snickered. “Funny, how most of you guys do.”
“Really?”
“Men with money know judges; it’s a fact.”
“I don’t ask favors, Mr. Dunn. I don’t need to.”
“Of course not. Just when it comes to sex slaves.”
“I’d rather not think of Jillian as a sex slave—although she certainly is by all modern standards. Regardless of what you call her, I want her back so we can fix what went wrong and move beyond it. I was going to ask her to marry me.”
Christopher knew that he was dangerously close to sounding ridiculous talking marriage, but gauging the bounty hunter’s response, the man looked as if he believed him.
Keeping a keen eye on his new client, Logan appraised the man’s motives, unsure how sincere or truthful he’d been. And yet, strangely, he was moved by him in a way few Dominant masters moved him. He could usually see through false schemes—and on several occasions had rejected a job because he felt the girl’s life might
actually be at risk. So far, Christopher Hurst was a mystery. A look at the pictures would tell him a lot.
“You get the warrant, pay my download payment, I’m on the job. You can contact me at the hotel.” He started to rise.
“Just one more thing,” Christopher stopped him.
“What’s that?” Logan sat back down.
“What happens when you find her?”
“I arrest her and bring her back.”
“And how does that work?”
“I usually travel by car or truck. I prefer that to planes, even though air travel is faster. A land route draws less attention, and attention is something you don’t want. It complicates things. You can trust I have no problem managing a woman in cuffs and chains, of which I have ample supply. I’ll even gag her if necessary. I assume your slave is used to bondage?”
“Oh, very. But I’m afraid,” he chuckled, “you’ll have her plenty aroused. Bondage is her sexual turn on.”
“Then let her be aroused. I don’t have sex with runaways.”
“Oh?”
“She’s not my property; she’s yours, Mr. Hurst.”
“Yes. That’s certainly right. But my property to give away if I like. And although I hate sharing her sweetness, her lush body with any man, she does transform remarkably when she’s being used, and that is quite a turn on for me.”
“I see. That’s very interesting.” He started to rise again. “Well then, I’ll get started. If I have questions about the photos, I’ll call you.”
Bounty Hunter Page 11
