An hour later, Bob suggested they give trying to get some sleep another try.
"Ohhhh,
I guess so," moaned Brenda. "Can Dammit sleep with me?" she
asked. Dammit had spent the majority of time sitting or lying
beside Brenda's legs while she tried to think up lies, and Bob told her
stories that were true, but which she thought were lies.
"That dog sleeps wherever she wants to," said Bob. "You can invite her, but don't get your hopes up."
Brenda
stood up and stretched. Her muscles felt sore, but it was a good
kind of sore. She went to the opening of her tent and called the
dog, which ran happily to her and sat down, tail wagging. She
looked back at Bob.
"I can't get undressed in that tiny thing," she said, pointing at the tent. "Promise you won't watch me?"
"I could help you," said Bob, twirling imaginary moustaches.
"You're
awful!" laughed the teenager. "Just don't watch me. You've
already seen more of my skin than most men." She snatched off the
cap he'd given her and bent over to point her bald pate at him..
"Yes,
Ma'am," said Bob, his voice in an exaggerated groan. "I am the
worst of the whole lot. The only reason they sent me with you was
so that you wouldn't mind leaving this poor earth."
She stood back up, and looked at him, her gaze level.
"You know, you talk to me differently than anybody else. Nobody else would make a joke about me dying."
"I'm sorry," he said, sounding sorry. "I didn't mean to cause you pain."
"No,
that's not what I meant," she said. "I know I'm going to
die. Everybody else knows it to, but they all tiptoe around it
like they can wish it away or something. But you're
different. I like that."
She walked over to him and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.
"Thank you," she said, dropping back to her heels.
Bob
stared at her. She really was pretty amazing, regardless of her
age. The maturity with which she accepted the inevitable was
admirable.
"My
pleasure," he said softly. "Especially if it gets me more
kisses." He grinned. "I don't get many kisses from sexy
young girls."
"That's
just because you're the worst of the whole lot." She stuck her
tongue out at him. "And you're ugly ... and you smell bad ... and
you scare the girls by talking about bears." She put her hands on
her hips as he assumed a wounded look. "I can think of more if
you want. I'm just trying to help."
Bob turned to his dog, who was sitting, her head swiveling back and forth between the speakers.
"I'm
going to bed now, Dammit. This shy little filly won't let me
watch her get naked, so you watch for me, OK, girl? You can tell
me all about it in the morning."
Ignoring Brenda, who tried to dredge up an outraged look, but managed only a grin, he crawled into his tent.
Brenda
shivered as she dropped her shirt, and bent to step out of her
jeans. Dressed only in bra and panties, she realized that he
hadn't put out the fire. It had burned low, but the glow still
lit up the side of her orange tent. She wondered if he was
peeking at her.
"Should I put the fire out?" she called to his tent.
His muffled reply told her his head was already inside his sleeping bag.
"No, it'll be OK. We'll be up in three or four hours anyway."
Feeling
somehow unsatisfied - that he wasn't peeking - she unhooked her bra and
skinned her panties down. Then, shivering, she crawled into her
tent and arranged herself in her sleeping bag. She whispered to
Dammit, who nosed through the opening of the tent. She held the
top of the bag open, and the dog crawled in with her, turning around,
her sharp claws treading on Brenda's stomach. Then the dog
flopped down alongside Brenda's side, and laid her head on Brenda's
shoulder. Brenda tugged the cap back on her head, and felt
warmer immediately. Dammit gave a long sigh and licked Brenda's
shoulder once.
Within minutes, everyone in the camp was asleep.
Bob
got up around five, but didn't waken the girl. They had time to
do what she wanted, even if that was sleep. The trip was planned
for three days, but if it extended, that was fine. He was sure
her parents wouldn't mind. As soon as he was out of his tent, he
saw Dammit wiggle through the flaps of the girl's tent and trot over to
nose at him.
"Morning, traitor," Bob whispered softly. Dammit wagged her tail.
He
walked into the woods to empty his bladder, and then took a walk
around, to see what had changed since he was last in this area.
It had been on his mourning tour, so he didn't expect to find anything
of interest. He didn't, but he enjoyed his walk, stretching his
muscles. He hadn't shaved, and the girl's off hand comment about
him smelling was probably true. He could deal with that later in
the day, when it was warmer.
He
found bear sign. It was relatively fresh, only three or four days
old. He cast about, and found three sets of prints, one larger,
and two small sets. He estimated the she-bear weighed a couple of
hundred pounds. The cubs were very young. Knowing
they'd made it through the winter made him feel good. He didn't
begrudge her this mountain. Unlike a lot of ranchers, Bob felt
like there was still room for all of them. The bears rarely
bothered his herd, and stayed shy of people. They didn't hurt
anything, and he didn't want to hurt them. Wolves were a
different proposition, but there weren't many on his property.
Since being re-introduced into the wild, they'd spread beyond the
borders of the national park that had brought them back. He was
keeping an eye on them. He'd heard some stories from other
ranchers. Wolves did more damage to cattle than bears. They
did damage to bears too, for that matter. Many a cub had been
taken by a pack of wolves, while the mother bellowed and snarled,
unable to protect more than one cub at a time. So far, he'd
only seen sign of two or three wolves on his property. He hoped
it stayed that way. It would bear watching.
He
approached the campsite silently, as he always moved. He was
startled to see Brenda, standing outside her tent. She must have
just awakened, because she was bent over, her back to him,
shimmying into a pair of panties. He stopped, staring. Part
of his mind wondered, as he watched her do the same thing as he had
seen Dannie do countless times. As she pulled at the waistband,
she wiggled her hips in a way only women could wiggle, as if she were
lowering her pussy and hips into them, rather than pulling them
up. She ran her thumbs around the waist, settling it where she
wanted it, and then bent to pick up a bra. Her clothing was
neatly piled at her feet.
Dammit, who had sat down, when her master stopped, barked. It was a "Why are we standing here?" kind of bark.
Brenda
turned, startled, and Bob saw her teenaged breasts, capped with rosy
pink nipples. Her eyes went wide, and her hands came up to
cover each breast. Turned at the waist like that, with not a hair
showing on her body, her hands drew attention to her nakedness in a way
that sent a streak of almost pain through Bob's balls.
"Sorry," he said, turning around to face away from her. "I didn't know you'd be up."
Brenda
scrambled to get her clothes on. She was so discombobulated by
the situation that she dropped her bra and pulled on her fresh shirt
without it. She climbed into her clean jeans. Had Bob been
watching, he'd have seen that little hip jiggle he'd seen before.
It would have made him harder than he already was. Right now, he
realized he was glad he'd turned around, because he was mostly
hard. He was almost shocked by the eroticness of what he'd just
seen, and its effect on him.
"I'm really sorry," he said to the trees he was facing.
"It's
... OK ..." she panted, buttoning the jeans. They fit tightly
enough that she didn't need a belt. She stood there, barefoot,
looking at his back. "You can turn around now."
Bob,
trying to lighten the mood, tried a joke. "You made me promise I
wouldn't watch while you got UN-dressed. You didn't say anything
about when you were getting dressed again."
Brenda
didn't quite know how to feel. At least twenty doctors had seen
her naked. She'd always felt a little strange, as they poked and
prodded, taking blood samples, and CAT scans and everything else they
did. Half of it didn't have anything to do with her head.
They were always testing things to see if the cancer had spread from
there. But they didn't act like they noticed her nakedness.
The doctors were always aloof and distant. She was always just a
patient to them. Having this man see her naked was
different somehow. She realized she was flushed, and excited, and
tried to examine that reaction. She didn't feel embarrassed,
exactly. It was something different than that.
She
remembered his eyes, when she had realized he was there, and turned to
see them. They had looked different, somehow, bigger, as if
he were seeing something amazing to him. But she was just a
girl. He'd been married. He'd seen a real woman naked ...
lots of times. Why had he looked at her like that? Her mind
flickered to his comment that she was "sexy". She'd wanted
to believe that, but it was impossible. She was a skinny bald
girl, with two or three months to live, if she was lucky.
Everybody had told her that, when she started going downhill, it would
happen fast. She'd get very, very sick, and then die. It
would only take a week or two.
Yet, he had looked at her like she WAS a woman ... maybe even a sexy woman.
He still hadn't turned around.
"It's OK, really," she said. She sat down to pull on socks and tennis shoes.
He
finally turned. He was walking funny, and his hands were hovering
over his groin, like he was the naked one, and he was hiding himself
from her.
"I'll just get breakfast back down here," he said, going to the rope that the saddle bags were suspended from.
It
was when he reached for the rope that she saw the bulge he had been
hiding. She may have been inexperienced, but she wasn't stupid.
She knew what an erect penis looked like. She and her friends had
surfed the net plenty of times, giggling and clicking on pictures that
they squealed over. Most of those pictures were fakes, of
course. No man could have a penis that big. It would stick
out all the time, even when it wasn't hard. They had checked out
plenty of men, peeking at the front of their pants, and hadn't seen
bulges like that. It had been fun, but it wasn't
real. They all knew that.
But
HERE was a bulge, and she knew what that bulge meant. It meant
she WAS sexy ... beyond all doubt. He had reacted to her,
and had been embarrassed about it.
By
fate, perhaps, the sun chose that exact moment to break into view, and
brilliant sunbeams flitted through the trees around them, to dapple the
ground with spots of bright yellow light. Brenda felt like she
might explode with joy, and that if she did, the pieces of her body
would be like those bright yellow splotches of sunlight, glowing with
happiness. He might be embarrassed about what had happened,
but she now knew that a man DID find her attractive ...
desirable. It was like a new sun had come up in her
life. It was a new day in Brenda Jean Ronson's life, and she
wanted to open up her arms to welcome it.
It
may have been Bob's embarrassment over getting a stiff prick in
front of a teenaged girl. Or maybe he kept thinking about what
she looked like, standing there in panties, her hands covering her
nipples. For whatever reason, he burned breakfast. Not that
it mattered to him. He ate whatever he cooked on the trail, good
or not.
Brenda's reaction, though, was decidedly different.
"How
can you EAT that?" she gasped, after one bite. He was shoveling
food into his mouth with the efficiency of a man on the trail, wanting
to get done with the necessities, and be on his horse.
"What's
wrong with it?" he asked, taking time to actually taste, and answer his
own question. Male pride kept him from voicing how badly it
tasted, though.
"I'm surprised you're alive if you eat like this all the time," she said, putting her plate down.
"Nobody's forcing it down your throat," muttered Bob.
"I know who's fixing lunch," she said firmly. "And it's not you!"
"I've done very well on my own cooking for the last month or so," he said, sounding injured.
Brenda
walked straight to him, and started feeling his arms. She moved
on to his ribs and he jumped back. He was still mostly hard, and
her touch felt intimate somehow.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm
trying to figure out what you have under those clothes. It's
surely not flesh." She giggled as he tried to get away from a
mere girl and went after him, her fingers grabbing for where his love
handles should be ... but weren't. "If you've been eating THAT
kind of cooking, you're stuffing your clothes with rags or
something. There's no WAY eating that stuff could make muscle."
Bob got a grip on her wrists, and proved that there WAS muscle in his arms.
"Behave!" he ordered.
"Says
the man who sneaks up on poor innocent girls and watches them as they
get dressed." She stuck out her tongue at him again.
"Yeah,
go ahead," he growled. "Stick your tongue out." He fell, by
habit, into something he'd said before, but to his much older wife,
when she did that. "I wouldn't want that thing in my mouth
either!"
He
realized with a start, how inappropriate that kind of thing was, and
let go of her. She hadn't even noticed his sexual
innuendo. She was still laughing at how uncomfortable she had
made him feel. Then she felt a twinge of conscience at needling
him, and stepped back. He was poised for flight, an unconscious
reaction to the situation on his part. He wasn't used to dealing
with situations like this, and was very uncomfortable. There was
an awkward moment of silence. It was broken when both, at the
same time, said "I'm sorry."
Bob
felt a surge of affection for this slip of a girl, who had only months
to live. It made him uncomfortable. Affection, along
with the fact that he couldn't get the image of her slim body, standing
there almost naked, made him feel like a pervert of some
kind. He turned away as he realized his prick was getting
harder, rather than softer, and busied himself with getting things
packed.
Brenda
watched him for a moment, her brain agile, despite the tumor that was
pressing against parts of it. She recognized, on an unconscious
level, that she bothered him, and associated it with what had
happened. Thinking about her body "bothering" a man was
something new and interesting ... a subject she had never really spent
any time reflecting on before.
Every
woman arrives at a time in her life when she realizes she has power of
a sexual nature. She sees, usually in a man's eyes, something
that tells her on a basic level, that she can control a man, at least
to some extent, based on that sexual aspect she has just discovered in
herself.
That
epiphany usually results in one of two reactions. One is
that she doesn't understand that power, and it scares her.
It's a little like holding raw energy in one's hands, that feels
dangerous. Some women back away from that power and refuse to
embrace it, or use it. It becomes something "other women" use ...
but not her ... at least not right then.
The
other routine reaction is that she sees it as a new toy, exciting and
interesting ... something to be played with ... something for fun and
amazement or amusement. In neither case does the
woman fully understand what's going on. If she embraces the
new power, it will take years, usually, to turn that into a force that
will affect her life in only positive ways. If she pushes
it away, it will be years before she realizes, if she ever does, that
she has turned her back on something that COULD have affected her life
in positive ways.
With
Brenda Jean Ronson, though, who measured life in weeks, instead of
years, the reaction was different. She had a way of examining
things much more deeply than other girls her age. Life was short,
from her perspective ... VERY short ... and each new thing she
discovered had to be examined closely, to see if it was worth
incorporating into the short time she had left to explore things with.
Brenda found this new thing ... this power over a man, however innocent ... somewhat intoxicating.
There
was another aspect of this epiphany that is worth mentioning, when it
came to Brenda. Brenda was a "good girl" ... a "moral
girl". She had been raised to be modest and polite. She
knew she was smart, and that she had talents which were
important. She also knew that humility was just as
important. She had seen other girls "working their sex" to get
what they wanted from boys, or even teachers. She had always been
somewhat disgusted when those girls flaunted their sexual power.
She was completely aware of the way advertisers capitalized on feminine
sexuality, and every woman's desire to be found sexually
attractive. She was also aware that most women would never reach
the pinnacle that those advertising models made it to, with their
professional hairstylists and makeup artists. It was all a lie,
really ... a fantasy drilled into every television viewer's brain, that
all women should look and act like that. Rather than
reaching for that impossible dream, she concentrated on being the kind
of girl people would miss when she was gone. To her, being a good
girl had a high priority. She wanted people to remember her
for the positive things in her life.
But,
when you have only months to live, priorities have a way of
shifting. You look at the life you have left a little differently
than the rest of humanity, which just assumes there will be countless
days ahead to explore the world and reach for that which pleases you.
In
that moment of epiphany, where the impossible dream looked almost real
in Bob's eyes ... her priorities underwent a subtle shift.
It
wasn't anything blatant, and she wasn't actually aware of the change in
her behavior. The first thing that happened was that, when
she realized she had dressed without a bra, she just decided to stay
that way. She had never gone anywhere in her life without
wearing a bra, at least not that she could remember. Her body had
developed early, and her mother had put her in bras since she was
eleven. As they mounted and rode away from the campsite, she was
intensely and intimately aware of the difference in feeling, as her
shirt moved and scraped across her sensitive nipples, which had never
been stroked before. It made her feel giddy ... naughty,
almost, as her unfettered breasts bobbed and bounced beneath her
shirt. Within a mile she was flushed and panting, just from the
unexpected, and unintended sensations her nipples spread through her
body.
The
world looked different, somehow ... brighter, with more vivid colors,
even though the only colors she saw were in the pallet of greens and
browns. The air smelled fresher, somehow, and the smell of
horse, and leather caressed her nose in a way foreign to the average
city girl.
She felt excited about life.
It
was perhaps another hour, as they sometimes walked, sometimes cantered,
and twice broke into a full run across meadows, that she began to
realize that the pressure of the saddle between her legs, where she
sometimes hit the saddle with a thump, was making her feel something
very much akin to what she sometimes felt when she washed between her
legs a little too long in the shower. She had always
stopped, mostly because her mother had firmly taught her, as a young
girl, not to wash too long there. Her mother didn't explain
why this particular part of her body should be clean, but not TOO
clean. It was just something she learned. And, when
those delicious feelings began to assert themselves, she just assumed
she had washed too long ... and stopped. She didn't
know it, but the poisons and radiation her body was bombarded with, had
spared her, in large degree, of the overwhelming surge of hormones that
assailed most girls her age. She had never actually been
... horny ... in her whole life.
The
scraping of her shirt, combined with where the saddle repeatedly
smacked her pussy, to say nothing of the hormones that, since her chemo
and radiation therapies had been abandoned, now coursed through her
veins ... changed that.
Two hours into their second day of riding the mountains of the Lazy N, Brenda Jean Ronson was horny.
She
didn't understand the feelings that coursed through her body. All
she knew was that it felt wonderful. At times, she thought it
must be some strange effect of her tumor. That worried her a
little. She knew to expect changes as her body surrendered to the
thing that was killing her slowly. But it felt so good that she
couldn't help but luxuriate in those feelings. If this was dying,
maybe dying wouldn't be so bad after all.
Her
eyes strayed more and more often to Bob, loping along on that
magnificent black horse, looking like he weighed ten pounds, instead of
almost two hundred. The way he swayed, to avoid a low
hanging branch, or leaned forward as his horse scrambled up a rocky
incline, made him look like he and the horse were really one creature,
almost like the fabled Centaurs of myth.
When
they stopped to stretch their legs, and snack on freeze-dried fruit,
she felt nervous and full of energy. She babbled, knowing she was
babbling, but his calm acceptance of her bombardment of questions,
about him, the ranch, the horses, even Dammit, and the way he patiently
answered those questions, made her babble seem completely
acceptable. He was an adult ... old enough to be her much
older brother ... but he paid attention to her, and she just felt
fabulous.
Bob,
for his part, noticed her flushed appearance, and motor-mouth.
But, like her, he assumed it was some facet of her disease. He
didn't feel pity, exactly. She was too vibrant and cute to feel
sorry for. Her questions were good ones, usually, and he enjoyed
telling her things.
Along
the way he showed her places that gave her an education in
geology. There was a place where half the mountainside had
collapsed, taking trees with it. The scar was probably thousands
of years old, but was still easily visible as a wide swath of bare rock
and rubble, with trees all around it. There were places
where they could see five different kinds of rocks in the same place,
rocks that had been created in completely different mixtures of natural
elements, but which lay side by side, thrown there, together, by
unimaginable forces at some distant time. There were huge
boulders that had been split cleanly in half by some incredible
force. They rode between such halves of rock.
You
cannot spend an extended time in the mountains, without thinking of how
they were made. The upheaval and violence of their creation
is clear, and reminds one that nothing alive could have survived being
in the middle of that creation when it happened. Yet, that awful,
violent beginning has led, for the most part, to incredible beauty and
peace, with life teeming all over it. The most violent of
beginnings led to the most serene and beautiful of places to be.
These
things had affected Bob for years, and now they affected Brenda
too. She had never felt so alive in her life, and she gave Bob
most of the credit.
To
say she developed a crush on him is unfair to her. She didn't
have any starry-eyed dreams about him. He was just a person who
had unlocked something in her that was wonderful, even if she couldn't
put her finger on just what that was. As a result, she felt drawn
to him in ways that most teenagers would think of as "love", but, which
to her, was more like how she felt about family, or a treasured friend.
They
continued down slope in the afternoon, and now they leaned back in the
saddle a little more. It took the pressure off of Brenda's
inflamed clitty, and allowed her to resume a more or less normal
breathing pattern. On the other hand, as the horses set
their front hooves, going down, it jolted the riders, and her breasts
bobbed in higher arcs, scraping her nipples until she felt the need to
squeeze them sometimes. She did that unconsciously. Her
attention was on the beauty all around her.
Though
the descent was gradual, they came down fifteen hundred feet in three
hours. It got warmer as they descended, and it was only natural
for Brenda to undo a couple of buttons at her neck, to let the breeze
of their passage fan her hot chest and aching nipples. She
also pulled off the sleeping cap, which had been keeping her head warm,
and stuffed it into a rear pocket of her jeans.
Again,
she heard the sound before she saw what caused it. It was a dull
roar, of sorts, a deep hissing sound that almost brought to mind the
deep, rasping breath of a dragon or some such beast. It was
steady, though, without the pauses that breathing would
generate. Buttercup tossed her head and whuffled, speeding
up a bit, until she was right on Ranger's tail. The big
horse turned his head to look backward, and Bob's head swiveled too.
"She
smells the water," said Bob. He looked at her horse's face like
she was a human being, and spoke to her the same way. "You
thirsty, girl?"
Buttercup
answered with a whinny, and head-butted Ranger's right hindquarter, as
if to say "Move over, brute, and let a lady through."
Bob
laughed and told Brenda to drop her reins. She did,
and was amazed at how empty her hands felt, even though all she'd been
doing was holding them. She hadn't had to give her horse any
directions. It had followed Ranger for miles. But she
had grown accustomed to feeling the leather in her fingers.
Suddenly it was hard to ride, as Buttercup kicked into a canter.
The easy rhythm she had learned fled, and her butt bounced as Brenda
grabbed for the saddle horn. That leaned her forward and
suddenly, her pussy was bouncing directly at the base of the
horn. The swell of the horn forced her knees apart, which only
increased the pressure. It was like a two hundred pound
leather hammer, thumping her clitty. Had she stood in
the stirrups, she would have eased both the bouncing and the pounding,
but, instead, like a greenhorn, she bounced instead.
That
the horse only went fifty or sixty yards is probably why she stayed in
the saddle as something exploded in her groin that she had never felt
before in her life. That something had origins in heat, that
expanded like a ball of fire into her abdomen, streaking up to her
nipples. If she hadn't been clinging to the horn with both
hands, she'd have squeezed those nipples instinctively with both hands.
She
was overwhelmed by a combination of dizziness, her body flopping in the
saddle, a sudden inability to breathe, and ecstasy of a kind she'd
never experienced before. Buttercup trotted around a
boulder and Brenda's eyes took in the thirty-foot waterfall that was
suddenly loud. There was a haze of white mist where the water
thundered into a pool that appeared to be boiling, at least at that
point. Buttercup came to a jarring stop and dropped
her head to drink. Brenda teetered, her legs betraying her by
trying now to stand up, which only tipped her forward even more.
The
saddle horn stopped her from sliding down Buttercup's neck into the
water. It dug into that spot that was still full of joyous
heat and ecstasy, and that was making her so weak she just wilted,
lying down across the horn, leaning automatically to mitigate the force
of that horn digging into her belly. She felt herself
sliding to her right and, in a burst of energy, tried to dismount,
instead of falling off. Her hands, still on the horn,
caught her with a force that jerked her shoulder joints
hard. Her right foot caught in the stirrup, and her left
one flailed, trying to find a place to land. She could feel her
hands slipping ... could sense the meeting of land and water beneath
her ... and knew she was going to fall gracelessly into the pool.
Then, out of nowhere, strong arms cradled her at her knees and shoulders.
"AACK"
she grunted as her hands slipped free and she fell a few inches, only
to end up in Bob's arms, her right foot still tangled in the
stirrup.
"Let's
get your foot loose first," came his deep voice in her ear.
She was suddenly aware that his right hand, in catching her, had cupped
her right breast. She was still tense ... still "ready" to
fall to the ground, and concentrating on her foot was
difficult. When she WAS able to think about that foot, she
tried to kick it, but the stirrup wouldn't cooperate. Her foot
had turned sideways in it, and it was stuck. She kept thinking
about how good it felt to have his hand on her breast, putting pressure
on her tingling nipple, and she couldn't concentrate on her foot.
Bob
didn't know quite what to do. His arms were full of wriggling
teenaged girl. He was acutely aware of her breast in his
hand. He hadn't meant to grab her there ... it had just happened
that way. And all her kicking did was move that breast around in
his hand. He couldn't lift her back up into the saddle, and
he couldn't let her down. He wanted to laugh at the fact
that his brain recognized that she smelled good as her smooth bald head
rubbed against his face while she kicked.
Her
foot finally came free and she went limp, panting. He tried to
set her down, but her knees were rubbery, and she turned into him to
put her arms around him for support. His big hands pressed
to her back, now, and stroked up and down.
"You're fine now," he said.
"Easy for you to say," came her voice, muffled from being pressed into his chest.
"What happened?" he asked. "You were doing so well."
"I
don't know." She was breathing more regularly now, and looked up
at his face. "All of a sudden I ... like ... forgot how to ride
or something ... and then this amazing feeling came over me and I was
bouncing around and she stopped and I sort of fell off."
"You OK now?"
"I
think so," she said, feeling strength come back into her legs.
She felt unaccountably happy, for having just made such a fool of
herself. "I actually feel wonderful!" She pulled away from
him a little, testing her knees. Her shirt drifted away from her
chest, and Bob was suddenly staring at bare cleavage, the inner slopes
of her breasts showing almost to their crowns.
Damn! She was so cute! He felt the telltale flow of blood into his groin, and stepped away from her in self defense.
"You
need to shave," she said, lifting fingers to her bald scalp, where his
two day growth had scratched her. "And you still need
a bath, too," she added, wrinkling her nose.
"Well, this is where I take them, sometimes," he said. "It's cold as the dickens, but the bottom is sandy and smooth."
She
turned to look at the pool. "You're kidding!" She turned
back to look at him. "Aren't you?" Her voice strained a bit
to overcome the noise made by the waterfall.
"Not
a bit," he said. "That water is just a hair over forty degrees,
and it'll turn you blue, but, on a hot day, it sure feels good to get
clean."
Brenda
had a sudden image in her head of the two of them, standing in cold
water ... naked. She was startled by the thought. She
didn't think about standing around naked in front of a man. She leaned
over and put her fingertips in the water.
"Brrrrr," she said, shaking her fingers off. "No way, Jose!"
"Suit
yourself," he said easily. "You can climb the rocks by the
falls while I clean up. The view up there is astonishing."
Bob
went to his saddle bags and dug into them to bring out a clean shirt
and pants. Ranger was drinking, while Buttercup had drifted away
to crop at the tender green shoots that grew in the clearing.
Brenda
climbed. The rock here, though sharply sloped, was rough, and
presented plenty of hand and footholds. She turned, once,
to look back down, and saw Bob's naked upper body, standing in the
pool. He was washing his arms and chest. His hands
dipped to his groin and she looked away ... back up. He was naked
again. Within the space of just a day, she had been around a
naked man twice. She realized her nipples were still tingling ...
or maybe tingling again. She was breathing hard now, from the climb,
but already she was even with the tops of the trees, and she'd only
gone a third of the way up. She'd already passed the place where
water gushed from a crack in the rock, and was above that
now. The sun felt hot on her shoulders, and she felt
herself beginning to sweat.
