Orchard Flower (version Alpha) by Lubrican



   Foreword This story is written in three versions, having the same, or
very similar beginnings, which branch out into different endings.  You are
reading version Alpha.

   The purpose of having a story that goes in three different directions is
to let the reader choose which direction most matches his or her interests.
You are welcome, of course, to read all three versions, but the following
information may affect your decision.

   In Version Alpha a mother and daughter compete for Bob's attention, and
mom asserts her dominance.

   In version Bravo, the daughter resists her mother's attempts to separate
her from Bob and she pursues him.

   In version Charlie, neither woman wants to give up.

   ===========

   Prologue

   Coincidence is an astonishing thing if you take the time to stop and
think about it.  Most of us don't.  Oh, we think about it fleetingly, as it
touches our lives now and then, but we don't actually give it the honor it
is due.  Some people think there isn't any such thing as coincidence, and
that everything is preordained.  They would call coincidence fate.  I'm not
one of those people.

   Coincidence is neither good nor bad, in and of itself.  The results can
be either, of course, but you can't blame that on coincidence.

   Take, for example the coincidence of a weak bolt being installed in the
engine of an airplane, and the coincidence of my wife being on that
airplane when that bolt broke.  We'd been married for three months when
that bolt snapped.  It happened to be a very important bolt, and the engine
lost power.  It was coincidence that there was a storm going on around the
plane at the time too.  The end result was that I lost her, and the wound
went deep enough that, ten years later I still haven't been on a date.  I
can blame the bolt, or the company that made it, or maybe the mechanic who
torqued it down too tightly.  But I can't blame coincidence.

   Even if we wanted to put all the blame there, that's all we'd have time
to do, because even though we don't think about it very much, our lives are
full of coincidence.  It happens all day long and only after it has
happened can you decide if it affected your life in small or large ways.

   It is coincidence that causes you to turn the alarm off but linger in
bed for another thirty seconds, instead of getting up immediately.  That
brief delay can mean you get to a particular intersection thirty seconds
after a five-car pileup.  That one's no small coincidence, as it turns out.


   And coincidence doesn't happen only in your own life.  The coincidence
that happens in other people's lives affects us all too.  But we rarely
think about the impact of coincidence in our lives.  At least most of us
think of it rarely.

   Sometimes something happens to bring our attention to it, though, and
that's what's happened to me.  I want to tell you about it, because
coincidence has turned out to be serendipity in my case, at least in some
ways.  I won't bore you by pointing out each instance where coincidence
altered things.  All I ask is that you remember that each time something
happened, it was probably the result of a number of coincidences, and that
the same thing is going on in your life even as you read this.

   After all, isn't it a coincidence that you even became aware this story
existed?



   Chapter One

   I got married at thirty-one, relatively late in life, after years of
thinking I'd never meet that special woman.  When she suddenly popped into
my life I was astonished, and then delighted.  Losing her was just as
sudden, and the emotions involved in it were even stronger.  I didn't even
have the closure of being able to bury her because ...  well ...  there
wasn't anything to put in the coffin.  The counselor the airline supplied
suggested I think of her as having been buried at sea.  That didn't help.

   I want you to know up front here that I'm not trying to get you to feel
sorry for me.  I took care of that, believe me.  I just want you to
understand the frame of mind I was in when things happened after that, or I
made decisions; that's all.

   I couldn't live in the house any more.  I had a company auction off all
the furniture and everything else we'd bought together.  I sold the house
too, because even seeing it from the outside made me want to fall down and
cry.  I didn't need a whole house any more anyway.  I couldn't get up the
interest to look for an apartment, and got a long term room in a fleabag
hotel because it was quick and easy.  The room had a television, though I
didn't watch it much.  I read a lot of books, though it took a really good
one to keep my mind off my loss.

   I kept my job as an accountant, because it was somewhere to go during
the day, and I could dull the pain by letting the numbers distract me.  Tax
season was the best, because I was busy extra hours of the day.  I turned
management of my own financial affairs over to Phil, a friend of mine who
didn't know what to say about Vicky being dead, but wanted to do something
to help.

   I found that if I went for a run that helped.  I wasn't a physical kind
of person before all this happened.  I had never been a runner before this,
but I'd heard that runners kind of zone out while they run and I
desperately wanted to zone out, so I tried it.  I didn't zone out, but
there were lots of things to distract me, particularly if I ran during rush
hour.  That's when I started running to and from work, instead of driving
my car.  Rain or shine, cold or hot, it didn't matter to me.  It was
something to do that kept me from constantly thinking about my loss.

   Three years later I was finally able to think about her without crying.
I probably should have stayed in therapy a lot longer than I did.  Maybe
that would have limited my mourning time to a year.

   Basically, though, one day it finally occurred to me that I didn't have
a life.  I looked around and took stock.  In the hotel room I had some
clothes and three neatly organized accordion folders of my personal
records. I had a few books.  I swapped books at the local used book place,
or got them from the library, so I didn't own that many.  I still had a
bunch of stuff in the self-storage place, but hadn't even been down there
in over a year.  I paid all my bills online from my computer at work, and
didn't get paper bank statements.  Whenever I paid a bill I saw a summary
of account activity, and all I ever checked routinely was the balance in my
checking account.  They say mechanics drive broken down cars, and
accountants never balance their checkbooks.  It's true, I guess.

   When I took the time to actually go talk to Phil and look at my own
financial situation I was mildly astonished to find that the proceeds of
the house, and my wife's life insurance, having been invested and rolled
over a number of times, had made me a modestly wealthy man.  Of course the
Spartan lifestyle I lived had a lot to do with that too.  I'd completely
forgotten about the fact that I'd signed papers for Phil to have almost
fifty percent of my salary diverted to an investment fund, and that I'd
also elected to pay taxes on it up front.  In short, if I wanted it, within
six months I could have over two million dollars in liquid assets available
to me.

   When you have that much money it's easy to overcompensate for awakening
from three years or so of lethargic non-involvement in the world.  While
before this I elected to do relatively nothing except feel sorry for
myself, now I went a little crazy trying to change the feel of my life.

   Things were slow one day, and I saw an ad in the paper about how the
government auctions off land to settle tax debts.  I'd seen it before, but
had never paid any attention to it.  This time I went to the web site that
was listed.

   For some reason I got interested in a four hundred acre farm in South
Dakota that had been seized by the government for back taxes.  I had this
stylized vision of being a gentleman farmer, which turned out to be a real
hoot.

   You can be an accountant anywhere.  South Dakota needs them, just like
everybody else.  It turned out that four hundred acres in South Dakota is
considered to be a garden plot by most ranchers.  If it's not land that's
contiguous with what you already own, it would be more of a pain in the ass
to mess with than be of any benefit to a big rancher.  In short, I got the
farm for a song.  I felt bad about that later, when I realized how the
former owners must have felt about losing it, but at the time I thought it
was great that I still had plenty of money in my investment accounts when I
got the deed to the place.

   It was after that that I found out farming is hard work, whether you
think you can hire somebody else to do it or not.  It's risky too.  Two
days of bad weather at the wrong time can ruin an entire year's crop. 
After the first two years I ended up renting most of the tillable land out
for shares of the crop, and turned the rest into pasture for horses.  I
usually board five or six these days, which kind of breaks even on the
expenses.  When I'm not taking care of horses I spend my time working on
the house, which is sixty or seventy years old, and on a garden that turned
out to be probably ten times larger than I really needed.  During harvest
season I spend a lot of time at the farmers' market and still end up
donating truckloads of food to the food bank.  I brought my Spartan
lifestyle with me.  I wash dishes by hand.  I heat as much as possible with
a wood stove.  I don't have cable or a cell phone.  When I'm not working
(which is unusual) I still read lots of books.  Somehow being closer to
nature made me feel closer to Vicky too, and I was able to talk to her out
there in the sun, wind and rain, and nobody would hear me.

   Well almost nobody.  I do have neighbors, though it took me years to get
to know them.  I first met Lynne the second day I'd lived there, when she
brought over a casserole as a housewarming gift.

   "Welcome to the neighborhood," she said calmly when I opened the door.
She said more than that, of course.  She introduced herself, and I somewhat
belatedly invited her in.  There were still boxes lying around, unopened,
and I had no furniture.  She told me about the local auction barn, which
had a public sale every Friday night.  I judged her to be twenty-two or so
and thought maybe she was the neighbor's daughter or something.  I figured
out that was an error when she said she and Paul, her husband, had a
seven-year-old daughter.

   It turned out that the land I'd bought had originally been in their
family.  Their house was only a quarter mile away and had been built by her
father.  I was living in her grandfather's house.

   That was about all I found out that day.  I met the little girl, whose
name was Jill, when I took the baking dish back.  Jill was a bright,
friendly talkative girl.  Her mother was on the phone when I arrived, so
Jill entertained me by asking at least three dozen questions about who I
was and where I came from and why I had bought Great Grandpa Lucian's house
and what was I going to grow and all manner of other things.

   Once Lynne was off the phone she scolded Jill for being snoopy.  The
girl flashed me a smile and disappeared off somewhere.  I ended up staying
for dinner and met Paul when he came in from tending their cattle.  I found
out during supper that they'd wanted to get my land back, but hadn't had
the money to compete.  There was no rancor about it.  Paul just suggested
that if farming didn't work out for me, he'd appreciate if I let him know
if I was going to sell or not.

   Being from the city I was a bit stand offish.  I was also somewhat shy,
because my people skills weren't the best.  I guess I took a page from
Jill's book and asked a lot of questions so that they'd do all the talking
instead of me.  In the process I found out they'd met in the local chapter
of Future Farmers of America, and that Lynne had inherited her farm, about
three thousand acres, from her parents.  Her grandfather's farm had already
been sold to a man who turned out to be a speculator.  When they got
married Paul was able to start building a herd of cattle.  Lynne spent most
of her time working in the orchard her parents had planted a couple of
years before she was born.  About all I told them was that I was a widower
who got tired of the city and wanted to give clean living a try.

   That was pretty much it, at least for a few months.  I went back home,
with mixed feelings because while it had been good to be able to do
something as simple as chat with some nice people, I didn't have the kind
of social skills to feel comfortable talking to them.  Paul was a strong
young man who looked like the cowboy incarnate.  Lynne was a pretty young
woman who made me feel uncomfortable BECAUSE I thought of her as being so
pretty.  I was thirty-five and they were both ten years younger.  And their
seven-year-old daughter was even more removed from my normal social group.

   Had I been so jaded as to think that Paul hoped I'd fail (so he could
try to buy the land) I would have been disabused of that notion almost
immediately.  Within days he came over and said he'd like to help me get
off to a good start.

   The good equipment, or at least the newer equipment, had been sold
before the farm was sold.  What was left was what might have been called
good equipment fifty years ago.  Of course I didn't know the difference,
and the fact that I had a tractor that ran, and plows and disks and harrows
and all that kind of thing made me think it would be easy.  After all, all
you did was ride the tractor, right?  Whatever the tractor was pulling did
all the work, right?

   Actually, as things turned out, the tools I had were about right for the
three hundred acres of tillable land I now owned.  It hadn't BEEN tilled
for over three years, but Paul helped me hook up the old three bottom plow
to the three-point hitch on the Massey Ferguson tractor and showed me how
to turn the earth over so it could be chopped up into smaller and smaller
pieces by succeeding implements.  It took me three weeks to prepare those
three hundred acres for planting and it was only then that I found out my
options for a crop that would have time to mature before winter came were
reduced to only one thing.

   That's how I became a sunflower farmer.

   After about two weeks, when he'd spared much more time than he could
afford to get me started, Paul went back to taking care of his cows and I
didn't see much of him after that.

   Other than at community social events, I saw Lynne about once a month
when she brought over a pie.  She made the most delicious homemade pies. 
What kind of pie she brought depended on what was in season.  If there was
no fruit ripe, she'd make lemon meringue, or chocolate, or banana cream or
some such thing.  Her rhubarb pie was one of my favorites.  I kept telling
her she didn't have to do that, and that I had nothing I could repay her
with.  When I tried to pay her money one time she went three months before
I got another pie.  She was just like that.  She kind of kept an eye on me,
I think.

   Actually, I saw more of Jill than I did her parents, at least for the
first three years.  As I labored to become a farmer I often saw Jill
sitting on a horse, watching me.  She'd smile and wave and, more often than
I like remembering, ride over to tell me what I was doing wrong.  She was a
skinny thing, with those coltish legs that make a girl look so awkward,
though she wasn't really awkward at all.  She knew ten times as much about
farming as I did.

   It was Jill who told me I was letting the weeds get too big amongst the
sunflowers.

   It was Jill who told me that the sweet corn in my garden was planted too
close together, and that unless I put a fence up, I wouldn't have any
lettuce because rabbits would eat it all.

   I hired a man to do all the things I didn't know how to do.  It was Jill
who told me he was shamming, going to sleep instead of working, or even
going off to town when I thought he was out in the fields.  She said he was
just collecting his pay instead of actually doing anything.  It was Jill
who said that the late hail we got in my third year had disrupted the soil
too much, and that my five-inch sunflowers - which weren't beaten down at
all, though a few were broken - would die.  They all did too.  That was
when I found out a sunflower can't be transplanted.  If the roots are
disturbed ...  it just dies.

   By the fourth year, when I finally realized I wasn't farmer material, I
rented out the tillable land to another sunflower farmer and started using
my other hundred acres for boarding horses.  I also hung out my sign as a
certified public accountant, so I could still be my own boss.  Turns out
farm taxes are complicated and time consuming, so folks were happy to have
me around.

   By that time Jill was eleven and she was a regular fixture around my
place.  Paul said she was still too young to work cows, but she'd been
riding horses since she could find a way to climb up on one.  During the
school year she'd come to my house for help with her math homework, and in
the summer time she spent a lot of hours "helping" me, though I think she
was really goofing off.  Her job was to climb high in the apple trees to do
the pruning up there, because she was small and light.  Because the orchard
was between their house and mine, it was easy for her to slip over to my
place.  I think she was keeping an eye on me too, though for different
reasons than her mother.

   Then one dark, stormy morning Jill came tearing into the yard on her
horse, screaming.

   ====================================

   It had been a rough, loud night, with the kind of lightning that comes
so often and so bright that it penetrates even closed eyelids and you can't
shut it out to go to sleep.  Thunder shook the house and rattled the
dishes. There were tornado watches going on all over the place.  That
morning Paul had gotten up early and gone out in it, trying to assess how
scattered the herd was.  He was the tallest thing on the plains and the
lightning killed both him and his horse.  When he hadn't come back for
breakfast, Lynne and Jill had gone looking for him.  Jill finished riding
her part of the search pattern and found her mother, sitting on the ground,
holding her father's lifeless body and rocking as she sobbed.

   Her mother wouldn't answer her.  Jill was old enough and smart enough to
know what her father's open, staring eyes meant, so she went to the only
other person she could ask for help from.

   ==================================

   Jill had taught me to ride when I took up boarding horses.  I had never
ridden in a driving rain and the slicker I was wearing was woefully
inadequate at keeping me dry, but I didn't think about that.  Jill had been
crying so hard that she couldn't talk, except to say "Daddy's dead," which
almost incapacitated me.  But I found the strength from somewhere to be the
adult.  I told her to lead me, and followed.  Lynne was still there, in a
puddle of water, holding her husband, beside a horse that was obviously
dead too.

   It took me twenty minutes - and Jill's help - to get her to let go of
him.  I was in good shape, and he wasn't a big man, so I was able to get
his body up and over the saddle of my horse.  I didn't have anything to
fasten him on with, so I walked slowly, leading my horse and looking back
most of the time.  Jill walked beside her mother, holding her hand.  Lynne
had stopped crying, and was just plodding forward.  I knew it would be
useless to ask her if she was OK, so I just paid attention at keeping
Paul's body on the horse.

   I don't know how long it took us to get back to the house.  It stopped
raining, but the clouds were still thick and black, and I couldn't see the
sun.  I didn't wear a watch any more, because what time it was really
didn't matter much.  I worked until the work was done, and then went in the
house to eat and read or whatever.

   Then, when we finally got to the house, I didn't know what to do with
Paul.  I started to carry him to the barn and Lynne finally spoke.  "No. 
Inside," she said.

   I didn't think that was a good idea, but wasn't willing to argue with
her.  Once inside, though, she went silent again.  I didn't think putting
his soaked body on their bed was the right thing to do, and besides, I
didn't even know where their bedroom was.  So I laid him out on the couch
and closed his eyes.  I could see a bright red streak down the side of his
neck, where the electricity had gone.  His hat was missing and a circle of
hair was burned away too.  Without the rain beating down on me I could see
that there was a hole in the leg of his jeans too, where the lightning had
burned through as it went from him into his horse.

   Lynne was standing, facing half away from him as if frozen.  Jill kept
trying to talk to her, but she wouldn't answer.  I went to the phone first,
and called 911, telling them what I thought had happened.  I had to ask
Jill what the address was and she took the phone from me.  While she talked
to the 911 operator, I tried to figure out what to do with Lynne.

   "You're wet," I said softly.  "You need to get dry clothes on." "He's
dead," she whispered, her voice broken."

   "You'll get sick if you don't take care of yourself," I said.

   "He kissed me goodbye this morning and now he's dead." Her dull voice
broke and a wail of pain welled up out of her.  All I could do was hold her
as she sobbed and screamed.

   Jill joined us, trying to hug her mother too, and crying again herself.
I let her into the hug and we all just stood there.  We were still standing
there when I heard the siren and saw the flashing lights through one
window. I tried to extricate myself from the tangle, but Lynne held on
fiercely.  Jill got loose and opened the door for the two paramedics and a
deputy who was with them.  Their examination of Paul was short.  Apparently
they'd seen it before.

   They were very efficient then.  After I told them who I was they tried
to talk to Lynne.  One of them talked on the radio and came up with a
sedative that he shot into her arm.  Then we carried her to the bedroom,
led by Jill who showed us the way.  The female paramedic shooed us out and
closed the door.

   I couldn't leave.  Jill needed somebody there with her, particularly
since her mother was going to be out for a while.  The paramedic assumed
I'd stay because he gave me instructions on what to do when Lynne woke up.
He also gave me some pills I could give her if she woke up too soon.

   =================================

   I almost gave one of those pills to Jill, who had exhibited such amazing
strength and control during the whole incident.  Once the body was gone,
and it was quiet in the house again though, she came unglued.  It took me
an hour to get her calmed down.  She was shaking like a leaf, and I didn't
know if it was emotional or environmental.  We were both still soaked, and
I felt chilled myself.

   She was eleven, which seemed like such a young age to me that I didn't
think twice about getting her clothes off of her so I could dry her off and
get her into dry things.  Thinking back on it, I had never seen an
eleven-year-old girl naked ...  not even when I was that age ...  so I
didn't know what to expect.  And anyway, her sexuality was the farthest
thing from my mind.

   To be fair, I did notice her budding breasts, with their tiny pink
nipples, which were startlingly erect and surrounded by goose bumps.  Her
whole body was studded with goose bumps.  And I noticed there was a
distinct lack of hair between her legs, where it was obvious she was
female. But I didn't stare, or leer or anything like that.  I just found
some sweat pants and a long-sleeved shirt that I got her to climb into. 
Then I found a towel and dried her hair as much as I could.  There was a
hair dryer in a bathroom across the hall from where Lynne was now sleeping,
and I pulled Jill in there to get her hair dry.  I brushed it while I used
the dryer on it, and by the time I was finished, she was only breaking into
sobs intermittently.

   I didn't know what to do then.  Food is comforting, so I took Jill to
the kitchen with me and tried to distract her by asking where things were.
I wasn't much of a cook, but I could do hamburger helper.  It turned out
they didn't have any hamburger helper, so I had to make do with meat and
noodles, which I added spices to, hoping they were the right spices, and
the right quantities of them.  I also put in a couple of cans of tomato
paste and a lot of cheese.

   At one point I saw that Jill had sat down.  She wasn't crying any more.
Instead, she was just staring at me, blinking every once in a while.

   "I'm sorry," I said.

   "I know," she answered.  "Me too." Her face scrunched up again and more
tears started.  I turned the heat down under the pan and went to hold her.
I didn't know what to say, so I just started talking about losing Vicky.  I
ended up sitting down, and Jill ended up sitting on my lap with her head
against my chest.  When I finally stopped talking I realized she'd fallen
into an exhausted sleep.

   I was afraid to move, for fear of waking her up, so I just sat there and
held her.

   =================================

   An hour and a half later I was stiff and sore when she woke up.  She
stood up, looked at me for a few seconds, and then left the room.  I hadn't
turned the heat down enough on the "hamburger helper" and the bottom was
burned, about a quarter inch thick.  I scraped the rest of it out of the
pan into a bowl and tried some.  It wasn't the best I ever had, by a long
shot, but it was at least edible.

   Jill came back.

   "She's still sleeping."

   "Good," I said.

   She came over and snuggled into my arms, needing a physical bond with
someone.

   "I'm going to go lie down with her," she said.

   "That's probably good too," I said softly.  "Call me when she wakes up."

   "You're going to stay?" She sounded surprised.

   "Of course," I said.

   She squeezed me, and then let go, leaving the room again.

   ====================================

   I'll leave off with the excruciating detail at this point.  Suffice it
to say that Lynne woke up, and needed someone there.  I stayed for three
days, dealing with the funeral home for her and letting Jill teach me to
cook food that didn't make them gag.  I got the tractor out to drag the
horse off to where Lynne wanted it buried.  It had already been ravaged by
coyotes, but the saddle and tack were salvageable.  There was lots more
that happened, but it isn't vital to the telling of this tale.  Not in
detail anyway.

   I looked in on them every day for long enough that it just became a
habit.  Lynne's sister came to visit from somewhere, and some other
relatives were there for the funeral.  Jill actually fled from them because
they made her feel sadder than just dealing with things herself.  Of course
she came to my place to get away from them.

   Lynne sold off the cattle and rented out the pasture to another rancher.
Paul's life insurance, which they had only been able to afford to keep
paying because his parents bought the policy for him when he was a baby,
was more than enough to take care of the funeral expenses and gave them
enough to fall back on for a while.

   Lynne and I spent hours sharing our grief.  It was good for both of us.
Jill spent even more time shadowing me, and time passed.

   Chapter Two

   Two years later they hit a financial snag.  Lynne mentioned it in the
same casual way she might have said that there were two weeks left before
apples would blossom.  We knew each other pretty well by then.  In many
ways I knew both Lynne and Jill better, and was closer to them than I had
been to Vicky, and it bothered me sometimes.  I had loved Vicky, and what I
felt for both Lynne and Jill was very different than what I'd felt for
Vicky, but the closeness we DID have was something I hadn't had time to
make with Vicky.

   For that reason I was completely comfortable around either of them,
while feeling tense and anxious at the same time.

   Part of that was because both Lynne and her daughter were handsome
women. At thirteen there was nothing gawky about Jill any more.  Lynne was
a well built woman, and her daughter had inherited those physical
characteristics.  Plenty of exercise and good food had brought Jill's
physical maturity on early.

   Both women had the same brown hair that looked blond sometimes.  Both
women had freckles scattered from one high cheekbone across the bridge of
the nose to the other cheek.  Both women had slim, but muscled legs leading
to wide hips below a narrow waist that flowed into firm, healthy breasts
that nicely filled whatever they were wearing.

   Of course Lynne had looked like that all along.  It was impossible for a
man to miss, and that was part of what made me so stumble tongued around
her in the beginning.  She was sunburned and windblown and still managed to
make me stare whenever I was around her.

   What it amounted to was that I was finally able to appreciate a woman
for BEING a woman, without feeling like I was cheating on Vicky.  So, when
Lynne mentioned that they'd have to tighten their belts I didn't feel like
I was prying to ask a few questions.  It turned out that there had been a
bunch of repairs needed that she hadn't told me about.  The water heater
had rusted out, and the annual inspection of the furnace had revealed a
crack in the combustion chamber.  Then the truck had to have tires.  It all
hit her about the same time and in the space of just a few months she'd had
to spend over three thousand dollars.  That meant she'd had to dip into the
money from Paul's insurance that had been set aside for Jill's college
education and she wasn't happy about that.  That fund had sat there,
gathering a little interest, but tuition kept going up and she was worried
that it wasn't going to be enough when the time came.

   "How much do you need?" I asked.

   She shot me a look.  "You know better than to think I'm asking you for
money," she said darkly.

   "True," I said calmly.  "So how much do you need?"

   "I'm not asking for a loan either," she said impatiently.  "We'll just
have to go without some things for a while until I can pay her college fund
back.  It won't kill us, Bob."

   I thought about it.  If anybody deserved to go to college it was Jill. I
had lots of money and didn't ever use it.  But there was Lynne's sense of
decorum to deal with.  Where the idea came from I don't know, but I was
glad it popped into my mind.

   "I've always wanted to be part owner in an apple orchard," I said.  "Of
course apple orchards aren't all that common around here.  You wouldn't
know of anybody who might be interested in selling shares of one ...  would
you?"

   She gave me a level stare, but I saw appreciation in her eyes.  "You
don't have to do that," she said softly.

   "I know.  I happen to have the money and I'm not using it for anything."

   "We don't make a profit on the apples," she said slowly.  "We break even
for the most part, or at least I've always thought that.  To be honest I
don't even keep good records on where the money from the sales of apples
goes."

   "Maybe that will change some day," I said.  "If there ever is a profit,
I'll take my share.  Until then, it's just an investment."

   She hugged me, and those firm, warm, disturbing breasts pressed into my
chest.  I felt guilty when things stirred in my pants.  That hadn't
happened in a long time.

   "I'll have to make you double the pies from now on," she said into my
chest.

   "I can live with that," I said into hair that smelled just wonderful.

   =====================

   She asked for five thousand as a buy-in.  I told her to give me a few
days and called Phil and asked him to do some research for me.  He needed
some information, which I got from Jill.  It turned out Lynne's parents,
whether they knew it or not, had done a lot more than plant a bunch of
trees.  They'd improved the value of the land a great deal.  Based on the
age of the trees, and the estimated output, that eighty acre orchard was
easily worth half a million dollars.  I went back to her with my checkbook
in hand.

   "I want to buy forty percent," I said as I sat down at the kitchen
table.

   "I don't know how much that is," she said, frowning.

   "I do," I said.  I wrote the check and handed it to her.  She looked at
it and blinked.  It was a two, followed by five zeros and I watched her
count those zeros twice.  She looked at me and back at the check.

   "This is too much," she said weakly.

   "That's what my analyst says forty percent is worth," I said.  "That's
assuming output goes up a bit.  You don't use pesticide or fertilize and
according to Phil, that makes the apples eligible to be marketed as
organically grown.  He says you'll have to ship them further, but you'll be
able to get more for them if you do."

   "This is two HUNDRED thousand dollars, Bob!" she panted.

   "Forty percent," I said calmly.

   "Do I have to have sex with you if I take this?" she asked weakly as she
sat down.

   My mouth dropped open and then snapped shut.  My mind shot off in twelve
directions at the same time.  It was the last thing I'd expected her to say
and I wasn't prepared to respond.  I gulped and she must have heard it. 
She looked up at me and smiled weakly.

   "I was kidding," she said.  She looked back at the check and then back
at me.  "At least I think I was."

   "NO!" I finally got out in a gasp.  She blinked and I realized it had
sounded awfully harsh.  I tried to undo any damage, because the last thing
I wanted to do was offend her.  I should have just kept my mouth shut,
because what came out was: "I mean I'd love to have sex with you, but it's
not part of the deal."

   I sat down then, and put my head in my hands.  "That's not what I
meant," I mumbled.

   "Would you like some pie, Bob?" she asked.

   I ventured a peek and saw she'd gotten up.  The check was still lying on
the table.  She was opening a cupboard and getting down a plate.  I saw the
pie was key lime with meringue on it as she put a huge piece onto a plate.
Then she opened the freezer and got out ice cream to go with it.  When she
served it to me she picked up the check and left the room.

   I think she was just giving me time to collect myself, because she
stayed gone long enough that when she came back in I was just cleaning up
the plate.  She took it and put it in the sink and sat down across from me.

   "Forty percent," she said firmly.  "It's a deal.  That's enough that I
can buy some new equipment to pick with.  If we hire some seasonal help -
high school kids most likely - we can pick double or triple what I've
picked in the past.  I always picked what I could get rid of and left the
rest to go back to nature.  I won't do that from now on.  And if you have
time, you'll have to help harvest.  Deal?"

   All I could think about was that she hadn't mentioned the sex.  I didn't
know whether to be happy or sad about that.  I decided it was all for the
best if we just forgot my gaffe, and nodded.

   "Thank you, Bob," she said softly.  Her eyes looked liquid and I was
afraid she was going to cry or something.  If she did that I knew I would
too and I already felt pretty foolish, so I stood up.

   "OK!" I said a little too loudly.  "Just let me know what I need to do
whenever I need to do it."

   I turned to leave and, as I went out the back door, I heard her voice
say "Deal!"

   =======================================

   I was weeding my carrots a few hours later when Jill showed up on
Prancer, her horse.  She got off, pulled me up to stand, put her arms
around my neck and kissed me right on the lips.

   Twice in the same day the Simmons women had left me flummoxed.

   "Thank you," she said after she stopped kissing me.  About then I felt
HER firm warm breasts pressing against my chest, and my cock started moving
in my pants again.

   "You're welcome," I said weakly.

   Then she got back on the horse she rode in on, and left, so to speak.

   ===================================

   A week later, I found a colt that was only two weeks old had been
injured.  It's leg had been torn open.  It wasn't a valuable animal, but I
was upset that any animal in my care had been hurt.  I had a good
relationship with the local vet and called him.  He came out and pronounced
that coyotes had done this thing.

   "How do I get rid of them?" I asked.

   "Poison," he said "though that will kill a lot more than the coyotes. 
You can hunt them, or hire people to hunt.  Some folks will do it for fun,
but sometimes they get a little out of control.  My recommendation is to
hunt them yourself.  You know where your animals are, and which direction
to shoot or not shoot and all that kind of thing." I didn't even own a gun.

   Naturally I called Lynne to find out what to do.  Paul must have had
coyote problems with the cattle, after all.  Jill answered.  Her mother had
gone to town, but she said she'd be right over.

   ==================================

   If you own guns, this will seem silly to you, but for those of you who
don't own one, particularly if you never have, imagine yourself standing in
the sporting goods section of your local WalMart, holding a rifle that
feels like it weighs fifty pounds while you get a lecture about "varmint
guns" from a sun-darkened thirteen year old girl wearing short shorts and a
blouse that's tied off under her breasts.  "Weird" doesn't even come close
to the feeling.  Now add in holding ...  almost fondling ...  long, thin
bullets that have a distinctly phallic appearance.

   "You want something that shoots flat and hot," explained Jill, who had
been shooting since she was six or seven.  She showed me a bullet as if I
could see how it would shoot.  "That way you have both good knock-down
power and the flat trajectory helps keep the bullet from going farther than
you want it to."

   I looked at the store clerk, who had his arms folded across his chest
and was nodding.  Why do your job when a teenage girl is going to do it for
you?  I might have glared at him.  Holding a gun made me feel like I killed
baby seals for sport.  I pointed at another rifle behind him.  It looked a
lot smaller and easier to handle.

   "What about that one?" I asked.  He glanced at it, and then to Jill,
pausing long enough to let her answer the question for him.

   "That's a twenty-two," said Jill patiently.  "You might be able to hit a
coyote with one, but probably not, and even then it might not kill it.  To
get a good shot with that you'd have to get a lot closer, which is the hard
part.  I'm telling you, Bob, you want a two-twenty-three for this.  With a
scope, even a blind man could hit a coyote from three hundred yards, which
is about as close as you can hope to come.  They're not stupid, Bob.  They
know people are bad news."

   I'd never felt like "bad news" before.  It was a strange way to think of
myself.

   "So I just look through the scope thing and pull the trigger and the
coyote dies?"

   The man behind the counter rolled his eyes at Jill, who sighed.  They
seemed to be communicating without words.

   "I'll teach you how to shoot," she said.

   "So I guess I want this one," I said, holding the heavy rifle out to the
man gingerly.  "And a carton of bullets too I guess," I added.  Jill
translated for me.

   "We'll take the Savage Lo Pro with the one-to-nine rate of twist, and
the Bushnell six-power scope with the firefly reticule.  And we'll need
five boxes of sixty-two grain ball for practice.  Just one box of the
fifty-five grain hollow point for when he's ready for the real deal."

   "Got it," said the clerk.  "Are you going to fill out the paperwork or
is he?"

   ===================================

   There is something just plain incongruous about a woman who buys a rifle
and ammunition to shoot furry dog-like things and then, on the way home,
flashes bare legs at the old man driving the truck as, with a foot pressed
to the dashboard, she paints her toenails bright, playful red.  Not for the
first time did I realize there was a woman hiding in that teenaged body,
and that Jill Simmons was a complicated female of the species.  She hummed
with the radio as she painted, making me wish I were twenty years younger.
Then, while her toenails dried, she unpacked the rifle and attached the
scope and carry strap.  That made me glad I was too old to go nosing around
this fresh-faced girl and get myself in trouble.

   The rifle didn't weigh fifty pounds.  With the scope, four rounds in the
magazine and one in the chamber and the sling on it, it weighed in at a
hair over ten pounds.  It just FELT like fifty pounds.  And don't be
impressed by my use of words like "rounds" and "chamber" and all that.  It
took me a week of Jill's tutoring to get the language down.  There was a
dip in the land at one end of the tillable property, and she set up a
target range in that.  She started me off at a hundred yards, which I
thought was ridiculous.  I couldn't even throw a rock that far.  How was I
supposed to shoot something that seemed like it was a mile away?  Then I
looked through the scope and it looked ridiculously easy until I pulled the
trigger the first time.  I wasn't ready for either the noise or the kick.

   She made me put on the headphones I'd forgotten to wear but the second
time I closed my eyes as I pulled the trigger, anticipating the sharp crack
and the stiff jolt to my shoulder.  I missed the target completely.

   She had me lying down in the beginning, which she called the prone
position.  I had to support my upper body on my elbows, with the carry
strap ...  sorry, I mean sling ...  wrapped around my left forearm.  It was
kind of nifty in a way because I didn't actually need my right hand to do
anything but pull the trigger.  The way she had me holding the rifle made
it stick right where it was supposed to.

   The way she solved my flinching problem was to lie down on top of me. 
She wasn't heavy, but she was all woman these days, and all that soft flesh
on top of me caused some really hard flesh to develop underneath me.  Her
right hand came down to almost caress my right hand as she spoke into the
earmuff, telling me what to do and what not to do and how to ease the
trigger back, instead of jerking it.  She made me shoot an entire box of
ammo without aiming at all, just to get me used to the kick and to let me
learn to keep my eyes open.

   About halfway through the next box I wanted to roll over and have her
lie on top of me that way.  It was very distracting, let me tell you. 
Which is why I started paying particular attention to the rifle.  I needed
the distraction.  I paid attention to the feel of it in my hands, and how
the bolt worked as I pulled and pushed on it, and how the round looked as
it was brought up out of the magazine and into the chamber.  I watched each
tip slide into the dark hole of the chamber and thought of the sexual
symbolism as I rammed the bolt forward, locking it down and caressing the
trigger until there was an explosion that shook the body.

   I was panting so hard by the end of the second box that she stopped me
and gave me a five-minute lecture on breathing control.  She slid off of
me, lying on her side with one leg over mine, probably because it was just
more comfortable for her that way.

   It wasn't comfortable for me, though.  I think it was the effort to try
to stop thinking about having wild sweaty sex with this delicious young
woman that finally brought all my attention to the task at hand.  Trying to
remember all the little parts of shooting correctly was taxing on the
untrained mind anyway.  I found that if I actually thought about not being
stiff, and not gripping things too tightly, and having the right
cheek-to-stock weld, and getting the right sight picture while taking three
breaths before holding one to shoot on ...  well if I thought of all those
things in the right order two things happened.  The first was that the
bullet made nice little holes in the target right where they were supposed
to.  The second was that Jill stayed a virgin that much longer.

   Not that I'd have actually fucked her.  I mean we were close, but not in
that way.  And I was almost thirty years older than she was too.  While I'd
have loved to climb between those sweet young thighs, she'd have probably
upchucked at the very idea.  So not thinking about that was a good thing.

   In short, trying not to think about what I wanted to do facilitated her
teaching me how to get good at the task I wasn't all that hot about
performing.

   When I put ten rounds within the space a fifty-cent piece would cover,
she said I was ready to learn to shoot sitting and standing.

   I was going to miss lying there beside her.

   Chapter Three

   I admit that the first time I shot at a coyote I got off my horse to do
it.  Jill had made me practice shooting on horseback, and on the tractor
too.  I had carried the rifle on my back so often that it no longer seemed
odd to do it.  But when I saw the brown flash of movement off in the
distance, I just wasn't willing to explore it from up on the horse.

   After I got down and spent five fruitless minutes trying to spot the
critter again, I almost gave up.  Then he trotted out from behind a bush
I'd examined a dozen times, and just looked around.  He didn't suspect a
thing, despite all the gunfire that had gone on around the place in the
last few weeks.  I'd hoped that just the noise of me learning how to shoot
would convince them to go live somewhere else.  No such luck, though.

   The kick surprised me completely.  I hadn't even 'decided' to pull the
trigger.  The first thing I thought of was that I hadn't evaluated what was
likely to be down range if I missed.  That was a bad thing and I felt
stupid.  As I felt a stab of shame though, the brown body in the field of
my sight did an almost magical backwards somersault and landed flat on the
ground.  Then it didn't move any more.

   I was astonished.

   It took me a few minutes to get to the body.  I was so out of it that I
didn't pay any attention to how far it had been or any of that.  I just
went to the body with the dreadful curiosity of someone who thinks he has
just killed something for the first time in his life.  Hunting is a
complicated endeavor.  Aiming is easy, and squeezing the trigger is simple
too.  It's what happens after that that makes things complicated.

   I stood, looking down at a shaggy, dusty, multi-colored coyote.  It's
mouth was partly open and I could see its teeth ...  perhaps the very teeth
that had savaged that colt's leg.  At the same time I knew that up until a
few minutes ago this had been a living creature.  I had assumed the role of
God, deciding what would live and what would die, and I didn't like that
role.  I knew the poor thing lying at my feet had to die, because of the
priorities that existed in my world.  But that didn't mean I was proud of
having killed it.  It occurred to me that I had learned this killing skill
very well, considering that I was successful on my very first shot off the
practice range.  That made me feel good, except that my success had been
the doom of another living creature, which robbed me of that good feeling.
And the whole time all this was going on in my brain I was hopped up on
adrenaline and hyperventilating.

   I thought about what to do with the body.  Jill had told me not to leave
anything for the others to eat unless I wanted to use it as bait and wait
for them to come feed.  I'd thought that was cold then, and it felt even
more distasteful now.  I picked up the carcass by the tail and tried to
figure out how to put it on my horse.  The horse wasn't impressed.  He had
taken the rifle shot calmly, but didn't like a coyote to be that close to
him, even if it was dead.  In the end I put the body in a tree until I
could get on the horse, and just carried it by the tail.

   Based on some strange urge that I still don't understand, I rode through
the apple orchard to show Jill what I'd done.  She was delighted, of
course, and took the body from me, asking me if I wanted to learn how to
skin it.  I declined, feeling sick at my stomach.  I said I had something
to do and left her leaning over the still warm body of my first kill, a
knife in her right hand.

   The next day I found the stiff skin of the coyote nailed to the side of
my barn.  To be honest, I didn't quite know how to feel about that.

   ============================

   It only took me six months to resolve the coyote problem.  By then I had
fourteen hides nailed up on the side of the barn and I no longer felt
guilty about killing them.  There was a farm two miles down the road where
I got fresh eggs and I saw what coyotes had done to some of her hens.  It
wasn't like they had nothing else to eat.  There was plenty of game around.
They just went for the easy stuff, which usually mean they went for what
humans owned.

   While I played great white hunter, Lynne and Jill put a lot of work into
the orchard, taking it much more seriously than they ever had before. 
Lynne studied the common problems, like apple scab and aphids and such, and
the ways that organic farmers dealt with them.  In the past there had been
plenty of apples for all the critters to share in.  That changed when she
got serious about making a profit on them.

   Jill put a lot of time into developing further markets and by the time
we started picking, instead of driving a pickup load of apples to the
farmer's market (something Jill had been dreaming of doing for years) she
had to settle for being ogled by the men who showed up in an eighteen
wheeler to pick up the six hundred crates of apples it had almost killed us
to pick and pack in a one-week period.

   And those six hundred crates had come from only four acres of orchard.
Three of her customers called and said they'd want even more apples next
year.  That was when she started talking about hiring high school kids to
help pick, and estimating we could ship three truckloads if all went well.

   =============================

   In the off season, meaning when we weren't actually picking apples, Jill
and I still spent hours and hours together.  I had gotten good enough at
shooting that we could have competitions.  I loved shooting in the summer
time, because Jill usually wore halter tops, or tank tops, and even
sometimes a T shirt that was cut off short so her stomach showed.  I'd glue
my eyes to her breasts, waiting for that special jiggle they'd display when
her rifle went off.  Shooting excited her too, and her nipples would get
hard.  There were a number of times I suspected she wasn't wearing a bra,
but her breasts were so firm that it was hard to tell unless a nipple
popped up.

   I had given up feeling guilty about lusting after her.  She paid no
attention to me at all in the sense she was completely comfortable around
me.  If she caught me staring at her she might say "What?!" but always
shrugged it off if I said "Nothing," or something like "I was just LOOKING
at you!  Can't I even LOOK at you?"

   And I had finally come to peace with the thought that Vicky would
probably have scolded me up one side and down the other for simply
arresting my social life, as far as women went.  Still, it was one thing to
gaze fondly at this girl, or her mother, for that matter, and have
distinctly naughty thoughts about them.  It was another completely to
translate those thoughts into actions.  Besides, I liked them both too much
to screw things up if I did something that made either of them
uncomfortable around me.

   In the years I had known her Jill had taught me things like welding,
most of what I knew about fixing the tractor, all about gardening and
things like that, while I had taught her woodcarving, and sketching.  They
didn't have a suitable tree on their property, so I had let her help me
build her a tree house in an elm out behind my house.  In all the years I'd
known her I'd never known her to take any interest in boys.  She never
talked about them to me, and never seemed frustrated about them or any of
that.  And several times Lynne bemoaned the fact that her daughter didn't
have a boyfriend.  She was around boys at school.  They just didn't impress
her or something.

   Of course I loved that part of things, in one sense, because I firmly
believed she was a virgin and that made my fantasies so much the sweeter.

   I'm not rambling here.  I tell you all this because you really need to
understand where my mind was, at this time of my life, because shortly
before Jill's eighteenth birthday everything kind of went crazy.  It was a
Saturday, and it was late July.  There was an air of anticipation in the
air, but only part of that had to do with the apple harvest.  The trees
were heavy with fruit, but it still needed some time to get to the picking
point.  The other part of it was that in the fall Jill would be going off
to college.  It seemed like somehow that would change everything.

   On this particular day I knew that Lynne was in town doing the weekly
shopping, and was looking for just the right birthday present for Jill. 
She had asked me to distract Jill so that she wouldn't want to go with her,
and had assigned us the task of inspecting the tops of the trees for signs
of pests.  We were concentrating on the trees that had been the best
producers the year before.  I used a ladder.  Jill still just climbed like
a monkey.

   I finished a tree and went looking for Jill.  She had the list of which
trees were done and which still needed to be inspected.  I was walking
under a tree when an apple whizzed by my shoulder, missing me by inches. 
It hit the ground by my foot with a thump.  I looked up to see a grinning
Jill standing in the branches.

   I only noticed the grin for a few seconds though, and the "HEY!  Watch
it!" that came out of my mouth was purely reflexive.  That's because I was
distracted rather quickly by things I could see other than her grin.  She
was wearing one of those T shirts that had been cut off above her belly
button.  Her breasts ...  her braless breasts by the way ...  were pushing
that shirt out so that I had a clear view of the undersides of creamy
looking swells.  She was also, for some obtuse reason, wearing a faded
jeans skirt that day, instead of the shorts she usually wore in the summer.
Looking up her tanned legs I saw white panties clinging lovingly to a
bubble butt and a pronounced mound of Venus.

   I know.  Panties don't cling lovingly to anything.  But if I were those
panties I'd be clinging to her soft skin, and it would be VERY lovingly!

   "What are YOU looking at?" she popped off.  I had to lick my lips before
I could speak.  "Nothing."

   "Liar!" she taunted.  "You were looking up my skirt, you dirty old man."

   "I was not!" I lied weakly and tried to go on the offensive.  "And you
should be wearing a bra too, young lady!"

   I had blown it, exposing myself as being, in fact, a dirty old man. 
"Mom never wears them," she said lightly.  "And now I know you were looking
up my shirt too." She put the back of one hand to her forehead in a
theatrical way and looked up.  "I feel so violated!" she moaned.

   "Sorry," I mumbled automatically.  I finally looked away.  I worked on
my muscles, which had kind of frozen up when I gazed on all that
loveliness, and started to walk away.

   "Wait!" she said.  "I was kidding!"

   That made me look up again.  This was a new Jill, one I had never met.
She was climbing down a few branches, and making no effort to avoid letting
me look at whatever I wanted to look at.

   "I know you look at me," she said, when her bare feet were on a branch
that was even with my head.  "I've seen you looking at me for years."

   "Oh," I said, feeling foolish.  All these years I'd thought she was
unaware of my oafish behavior.

   "Don't look so guilty," she said, squatting down.  Her skirt lay on her
thighs in the front, and hung down in the back.  With her knees spread like
that the front of her panties were on display right in front of my face.  I
almost thought she was aware of what she was doing.  "I like it."

   "What?" My eyes popped up to her face.  She had amber eyes, brown, but
with flecks of yellow in them.

   "It makes me feel good when you look at me like that."

   "Like what?" I have no idea why I asked the question.  I was off balance
and just making noises, I think.

   "Like I'm a woman and you're a man who is interested."

   Well that little revelation about unhinged me, but years of self control
sought to make another appearance.

   "I'm way too old to be interested in a girl like you," I said.  "I
shouldn't look, but I appreciate you cutting me some slack."

   "Why shouldn't you look?  I like it.  Mom likes it when you look at her
too."

   "What?" I think my eyes might have bugged out a bit.

   "We talk about you sometimes." She said it as if she'd said something
like "Apples get red when they ripen, you know."

   "You do?"

   "Of course.  You're the only man in our life, for all intents and
purposes.  Why wouldn't we talk about you?  And you make us both feel good
...  like we're pretty, maybe."

   I felt like I was in a dream, so I said something I'd probably say in a
dream.

   "That's because you ARE both very pretty."

   "Thank you, Sir," she said, grinning.

   "Would you please close your legs?" I have no idea what part of my brain
thought to say that.

   "Why?" She sounded actually curious.

   "Because I can see your panties," I said.

   She tilted her head and then giggled.  "That reminds me of a joke I
heard a long time ago when I was in, like, the fourth grade or something."

   She stood up and, like she had done it a hundred times before, reached
under her skirt and slid her panties down to her knees.  She had superb
balance when she was in a tree - she was half monkey - and she bent over to
lift one foot.  The panties dropped off that foot and fell to the ankle of
the foot that was still standing on the branch.  She reached for them,
changed feet and stood up wadding the white cloth into a small ball that
fit in her hands.

   Then she squatted again, with her knees spread.

   "I fixed it," she said softly.  "Now you can't see my panties any more."


   I felt the blood rushing from my face, headed south, no doubt, and had
the errant thought that in a few seconds I was going to have a truly
magnificent erection, except that I was also going to pass out.  Dimly, as
if from a great distance, I heard Jill's soft voice still speaking.

   "Is that better?  I like it when you look at me like that too."

   ===================================

   You've heard of alcoholic blackouts, where somebody does things they
can't remember later.  What happened next was exactly like that ...  only
completely different.

   I "awoke" to find my nose buried in soft teenage pussy hair and my lips
sucking at her feminine nectar.  My tongue was drilling against her clitty
and I was making a LOT of noise.  While I could not, for the life of me,
remember deciding to shove my face between her legs, I was aware that she
wasn't unhappy that I had done so.  She was cursing softly, using words I'd
never heard her lips utter, but both of her hands were on the top back of
my head and her legs were still spread wide.  I felt her push against me
and realized she was balanced, leaning into my mouth, and that I was
actually holding her on the branch.

   "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, I knew it would be good," she moaned.  "I
knew it, oh please don't stop, Bob, oh FUCK if you keep doing that I'm
gonna cum!"

   If all this seems sudden to you, reading this, just try to imagine what
it was like for me.  This was a completely new Jill, a part of her that was
obviously there, but that I'd never seen, despite all that time we spent
together.  I was acting on autopilot, which is the only reason I ended up
doing what I was doing.  It's hard to explain.

   I DO remember vaguely thinking "Well ...  in for a penny, in for a
pound," and that I might end up in the back of a police car for this, but I
was going to know I had given her a good time.

   I circled her clit with my lips.  Not having seen it yet, I was working
by feel alone.  It had been ten years since I'd done this to Vicky, and she
had just been getting comfortable with it, having grown up in a
conservative family where something like this wasn't even thought of, much
less practiced.  So I knew I wasn't all that good at it.  Then again, I was
also sure Jill had never had this done to her before, so she wouldn't know
the difference.

   Her clit wasn't huge, but I was able to nip at it with my teeth and
squeeze it gently between them as I sucked.

   "OH FUCK!" she gasped, and one of her hands left my head as she leaned
too hard and pushed me back.  Just at the crucial moment I had to decide
whether to keep pushing with my face, or catch her as she fell.  She
wouldn't remember that orgasm if she had a concussion, so I opted for
putting my hands on her waist and stepping back.

   "Noooo," she whined as she tried to hold herself up in the tree with one
hand.

   "Let go," I ordered.

   She did and her body slid down mine.  We didn't mow the grass under the
trees, because the limbs hung too low, and there was a soft green blanket
probably fourteen inches thick.  I laid her back on it, flipped the front
of her skirt up and dove back in.  When she figured out what I was doing
her legs sprang open again and her hands came back.

   "Yesssss," she hissed.

   I couldn't fuck her, but I could eat the heck out of that sweet pussy. I
made up for lack of experience with an almost frantic gusto, probing her
pussy with my tongue, and licking and sucking her clit over and over again.
I didn't seem to be able to get her as close as I had that one time, even
when I used my teeth in the same way.  I found the answer by accident as my
face slid in her slippery juices and my chin, with the barest hint of
stubble on it, scraped over her clit.  "OHHH!" she gasped.

   Damned if I didn't give her her first orgasm with my chin, just pressing
it hard against her clit and making little chewing motions.  I had a vague
memory that things were really sensitive down there after an orgasm.  I
realized I should probably stop rubbing her clitty raw, but I didn't want
this to end.  So I crawled up to kiss her.

   Of course, along the way, I ran into breasts that were no longer covered
by half a T shirt, and just HAD to linger there and get to know a couple of
stiff, pink nipples.  While I was doing that she must have found the shirt
constrictive or something, because she pulled it over her head and lay,
half naked, holding my head to her breasts.

   Then I had to kiss her.  Don't ask me why, but it was important to me.
My face was still wet from eating her pussy, but she didn't seem to mind.
My moisturized lips tenderly touched hers.

   Jill's response was to mold her lips against mine and kiss me back.  The
tension in her lips suggested she hadn't done this too much either.  By
softening my lips and using them to "eat" hers, I taught her to relax. 
Within seconds my tongue was teasing her teeth.  She was a quick learner,
she was.

   Then her hand slid to the front of my pants, where all that blood went
that had left my brain, and which I blamed for my "blackout." Her hand
found the long lump of my rock hard penis and squeezed it as she explored
this new and fascinating thing that she was experiencing.  That got my
attention in a very sobering way, because I wanted nothing more than to use
what she was squeezing for its intended purpose.

   But I knew I couldn't.

   "Oh man Jill, we have to stop this!" I finally managed to say.  "Girlie
girl, if you were older than you are ..." I panted as she squeezed hard. 
"We can't!" I gasped.  "Listen here.  I'm going to make you cum one more
time and then I'm going someplace else.  Afterwards, we both have to forget
this ever happened!'

   Paying no attention to the defiant look on Jill's rebellious face, I got
back down between her sweet thighs and wildly attacked the young pussy
between her legs.  My mouth kissed, my lips sucked, and my flicking tongue
licked.  I nibbled her clitty and her hips bucked hard.  This sweet,
pleasurable chore didn't take as long as I thought it would.  After a mere
five minutes of furious pussy consumption, I heard the girl cry out as
another orgasm grabbed hold of her.  Her body jerked against my face and
sprayed me with feminine cum.

   Still, I continued licking, sticking my tongue as deep as I could into
her pussy hole and slurping up all her juices.  Her whines and whimpers
were such music to my ears.

   It was too much.  I had to do something.  I was determined not to fuck
her, but I had to do something.  I elected to jerk off right then and
there. I rolled over, shoved my pants down, and gripped my little friend.

   I was so engrossed in jerking the cum out of my balls that I didn't see
her sit up and examine what I was doing.  She apparently wanted to help,
because her hand came to stop mine and then push it away, to be replaced by
hers.

   I was pretty sure Jill didn't really know what to do.  Her slim, long
fingers were wrapped around my thick, pulsating cockshaft!  But did she
know how to give a hand job?  Part of me hoped she did, but part of me
wanted her to never have touched a cock before.

   The answer was: 'apparently not'.  She made several clumsy attempts at
fondling and groping.  She squeezed my semen-filled testicles
experimentally.  She pulled and tugged on my pubic hair.  It was all quite
fun, but not very satisfying.

   I'd already blown it - no pun intended - and I supposed it couldn't be
so terrible if I adopted the idea that right now was as good a time as any
other for this girl to learn about hand jobs and what they produced.  Using
one of my hands, I guided Jill's hand in the time honored movements that
induced semen to squirt from a penis.

   Inexperienced she might be, but she caught on to the manual mechanics of
pumping a cock in a very short time.  At first, she timidly stroked with
slow movements.  Gaining confidence, she increased the tempo.

   I knew I couldn't last long before blowing my wad.  I'd been hard and
ready for quite a while.  My mouth was still full of the delicious taste of
young pussy flesh.  My nose was still filled with the intoxicating scent of
musky turned-on girl juice.

   With just a few more strokes of her soft hand my swollen erection
decided it was time to jump on the orgasm bandwagon.

   I should have warned her, but I was too involved in the anticipation and
the feel of that first pressurized stream rocketing through my prick.  Hot,
creamy cum shot out and struck Jill's chin.  She jerked, but didn't let go.
Her jerk changed the trajectory of the next spurt and it hit her right
nipple.  Then she got it aimed upward and a two foot arc of white landed on
the grass to my right.  She continued to jerk until I stopped her when it
got too tender.

   She finally spoke actual words for the first time since I had lost
control and stepped blithely off the cliff.

   "Oh no!" she suddenly moaned.  "It's shrinking!  I thought it was
supposed to stay hard so you could ...  you know ...  do it with me."

   I took some really deep breaths, trying to settle down.  "Jill,
sweetie," I finally answered.  "This is what happens to a man's cock after
he's had a good hand job and cum all over the place!  And I'm not going to
do it with you.  You are my friend's too-young daughter!  Now girl, get
dressed and run on home.  I shouldn't have done this in the first place. 
Please just forget it happened.  Now, go on home.  We will never ever do
anything like this again!"

   Jill lowered her head and smiled demurely, "We might do it again," she
said coyly.  "I think anything is possible, don't you agree?"

   "No I don't!" I answered adamantly.  "It's not possible for this to
happen again.  Besides, you're not interested in this kind of thing.  You
don't even have a boyfriend!"

   "I've always been interested in it," she said calmly.  "Just not with
the boys my friends at school are interested in it with." She stood up,
scooping my cum off of her breast and examining it closely.  "I was pretty
sure it had to be fun, but I had no idea it would be THAT much fun.  And
I'm almost eighteen.  I'm pretty sure this IS going to happen again, Bob."
She rubbed spermy fingers together and then, to my astonishment, dropped
them to her puffy vulva and rubbed the sperm into her pussy lips. 
"Mmmmmm."

   "Stop that!" I snapped.  "In there is the last place you want my sperm,
young lady!"

   "Feels good to me," she sighed.  Her rubbing went on uninterrupted. 
"Will it feel good if your belly swells up with a baby in it?  Don't be an
idiot, Jill."

   "I'm not an idiot," she complained, finally pulling her fingers away
from her pussy lips.  "I just know what I like.  I liked that, Bob.  I
liked it a lot."

   "This is wrong, sweetheart," I moaned.  "Remember that," I said. 
"Because it's not going to happen again.  Your mother would take a shotgun
to me if she found out I even touched you!"

   As I turned my back and walked away from the promise of further taboo
temptation, I heard Jill's voice defiantly declare, "Don't bet on it, Bob.
You might lose!"

   Chapter Four

   By the next morning, I was beginning to halfway believe it had all been
a dream.  Little tomboy Jill, who I'd watched grow up, and whose nubile
teenage woman body I had violated, hadn't actually had an orgasm around my
tongue, or milked my balls empty.

   Yet, even after I'd brushed my teeth and used mouthwash, my mouth still
seemed to have the lingering taste of young pussy in it.  Even the next day
my nostrils flared every once in a while, thinking they smelled that lovely
fresh scent.

   Standing in the wide doorway of my barn, I noticed a speeding dirt bike
racing across the fields.  The rider was the tomboy girl I'd been thinking
about since yesterday.  She saw me and sped straight towards where I was. I
then remembered this was Saturday morning and there was no school today.  I
shook my head and again silently told myself, "Calm down, you can handle
this!"

   Skidding to stop just inches from me, the girl killed the noisy engine,
giggled merrily, and said, "Hi, Bob.  Can I talk to you for a few minutes?
It's important."

   In the next few seconds my subconscious mind made a visual inspection of
the young bike-riding tomboy girl.  She was wearing a denim colored shirt
with the tails tied together under her breasts, which pushed the fabric out
proudly.  When had her breasts gotten so big?  Gym shorts and tennis shoes
without socks were her only other covering, except for the faded John Deere
cap on her head.  Her pony tail was captured by the adjusting band of the
cap.

   I began asking myself how come I hadn't noticed how much she'd grown up
before now.  I saw this fully clothed young woman, but my eyes were
remembering the mostly naked teenager's body from yesterday!  Without my
permission, my cock sprang to attention inside my jeans.

   "Okay," I said carefully.  "Go ahead and talk, but please make it quick
and then go on home.  It's not that I don't like you.  I do.  But you're
very tempting and I don't want to be tempted."

   Jill's head lowered a bit.  Now that she was here, she seemed hesitant
to talk.  "Bob," she whispered.  "There's something I'm feeling 'guilty'
about.  I worried about it all night.  I want to do the right thing."

   Oh boy.  Remorse had set in.  She was sorry for what we'd done and she
was probably going to tell her mother.  Lynne would see to it that my
daughter-molesting ass was sent straight to the county lockup.

   "It's about yesterday," Jill explained.

   "I know I shouldn't have done that," I moaned, interrupting her.  "I
lost control and I'm sorry and I promise it won't happen again."

   "That's what I'm talking about," she said patiently.  "I teased you, and
that wasn't fair.  Mom said that men don't have as much control as women
do, and that a woman shouldn't usually tease a man."

   "You told your mother?" My voice was weak and I felt like I needed to
sit down.

   "No." She peered at me closely.  "She just told me that one time.  I got
curious about it and decided to tease you and see what it would feel like
...  what would happen.  The point is that I'm the one who should be saying
I'm sorry, not you.  I teased you and I'm sorry I made you lose control."

   "Oh," I croaked.  She wasn't going to tell after all.

   "Yup," she said.  "I thought about it all night.  I'm definitely going
to have to get me a boyfriend."

   "You are?"

   "Well sure," she said.  "You said you won't do it again, and after
feeling that I just HAVE to do it again.  Knowing the way boys are I'm sure
lots of them would like to suck my pussy like you did."

   I had visions of some pimply faced youth crawling between her legs and
it just about killed me.  She deserved better than that.

   "You could just go without," I suggested.  "You know ...  wait until you
get to college and get some education under your belt and get a little more
experience with men."

   She shook her head.  "Nope.  I don't think so.  I think sex must be like
crack cocaine.  It's instantly addictive.  I had no idea how good I could
feel.  If I'd have known I'd have been having sex for years."

   "But you can't let some boy paw you," I moaned.

   "Why not?  It's so much fun!" she beamed.

   "Boys don't know shit about making a woman feel good," I said.

   "Well, I suppose you're right," she said.  She shrugged her shoulders.
"I guess if they do it enough, though, they'll get better.  Maybe I should
get a different boy to suck my pussy every day, until I find one who's good
at it, like you."

   I cringed.  I knew that any boy who got his mouth on her clitty would be
trying to get his dick in her pussy too, and that sooner or later one of
them would succeed.  I couldn't stand the thought of that.

   "That's a bad idea," I said.  "All those guys will try to have sex with
you."

   "I know," she said, shrugging her shoulders again.

   "You mean you're going to let them?" I croaked.

   "Maybe," she said.  "I don't know yet.  But probably.  All the girls I
know let boys fuck them.  I didn't understand it until yesterday, but
thanks to your wonderful teaching I get it now." She grinned.  "I mean I
purely loved your tongue in my pussy, and they say that fucking feels even
better."

   Now she was making ME responsible for turning her into a slut.  "You
can't do this, Jill," I moaned.

   "Bob, I can't just stop," she said patiently.  "If felt too good. 
Anyway, I just wanted to apologize to you, and tell you I'm not mad.  I
learned a lot.  You kind of changed my whole life I think.  I have so much
to look forward to." She flashed me a grin and turned away.  She started
for the bike and something in me snapped.

   "Wait!" I said.

   She turned and came back toward me.  Her face was the perfect image of a
young woman pausing for me to tell her why I wanted her to wait.  Only
later would I really understand she was just acting.  She was a very good
actress.

   "Come here," I said.  My mind was whirling.  I'm not sure I was actually
thinking things through.  She came to stand right in front of me, those
yellow-flecked brown eyes staring at me from under the bill of that faded
hat.

   Abruptly, my hand reached out and pulled the girl's upper body against
my chest.  Her arms encircled me.  I cradled her in my muscular arms.  She
raised her face upwards, looked me in the eyes and the next thing I knew we
were kissing.

   Kiss her, I did.  She kissed me, too.  Warm, wet lips collided in a
spark of forbidden passion.  Teasing, tickling tongues dueled and played
merry mouth-fucking games.

   When we broke her impish eyes looked into mine.  "You gonna make me feel
good again so I don't have to go find some boy to do it?"

   I was lost, and I knew it.  But her voice gave her away, finally.

   "You're teasing me again," I muttered.

   "I know," she sighed, grinding the front of her shorts against the lump
in my pants.

   I led Jill into the barn.  Just inside the doorway where there was muted
light, there was a four-foot long bench which was about eighteen inches
wide and about two feet tall.  It was for people to sit on to put their
boots on when they came out to ride their horses.  I sat the girl down and
told to sit with her legs astride it.  I sat down astraddle behind her.

   Jill made no objections as I untied and unbuttoned her blue shirt.  She
was braless under it and her chest arched as my hands covered her breasts
and squeezed her soft titties.  I desperately wanted my skin against hers
and I abandoned her soft orbs long enough to get my own shirt off.  She got
rid of hers too.  Then, with my naked chest pressed tightly against the
smoothness of her back, I reached around to fondle her breasts and squeeze
her nipples gently.

   While I nuzzled Jill's neck with my mouth, one of my hands dropped to
slide under the elastic waistband of her shorts.  She wasn't wearing
panties either, and my fingers slid onto pussy lips that were already
slippery in anticipation of what she'd come there for.  Apparently, she
knew me better than I knew myself.  She'd played me like a well tuned
piano. I slid a finger into her pussy for the first time and, finding no
obstruction there, got it as deep into her as I could.  Her head fell back
on my shoulder as she groaned.

   "I knew that would feel good too when you finally did it," she moaned.

   For several minutes, my hands took turns playing with Jill's feminine
'girlie girl' toys.  My right hand played with her pussy while my left
played with both young breasts.  She started wiggling as my finger circled
her slippery clitty.

   "Jill," I whispered while nibbling on an earlobe.  "Kick off your shoes
and slip off your shorts."

   Jill stood and followed my instructions.  She was undressing completely.
I began doing the same thing.  Our clothing fell in a conjoined pile on the
dirt floor of the barn.

   With Jill still standing, I sat back down.  I played for a few minutes
with the nicest young ass I'd ever seen in my life.  Bending the girl over,
I kissed the seductively enticing cheeks.  This teenager's ass was
well-formed and protruded prominently out behind her body.  She seemed to
know to spread her legs, and that sweet virgin pussy winked at me.

   She straightened up and I pulled her against me.  I was kissing her back
and neck as she slowly sat down.  Jill's smooth ass slid down my chest. 
The slim legs straddling the bench were unintentionally positioning the
young female body in a way that when she sat her pussy was astride my
elongated cock.  She seemed to know instinctively that if she leaned
forward and let her belly sag, she could rest her pussy lips right on my
prick.

   I spread my knees wide, to give her room to move on my cock.  She wasn't
all that heavy, and it didn't hurt.  Jill found the position in which she
could rest, splitting her pussy lips perfectly on my steel-hard cockshaft.
She had already figured out she could put pressure on her clit and her
upper body, supported by stiff arms on the bench, moved spasmodically.  She
moved forward, just an inch and, holding her hips, I helped her move back.

   She picked up the rhythm of that, jerking forward and back, leaning more
and more forward until I couldn't reach her titties any more.  She was
supporting her own weight now, and moaning loudly.  I couldn't see her
pussy, because her fine young butt hid it, but I could imagine those
weeping pussy lips and the hole that kept riding forward to sit on my knob.
When she did that, her weight pushed the knob up into the hole.

   I let the girl play while I contented myself with feeling her slippery
pussy lips jacking me off.  Just that was getting close to making me blow
my load.

   "Oh baby," I said at last.  "This is too tempting.  I need to get you
off and then you need to go home, OK?"

   She looked over her shoulder.  "How are you going to get me off?"

   I thought about that.  I was pretty sure that if I could suck her
nipples that would help.  And what popped into my mind suggested a harmless
way for me to get off too.

   "How about you turn yourself around and try that from the front?"

   She turned around and I lay back on the board.  My cock flopped up on my
belly.  She straddled the bench and almost carefully settled her pussy
down, this time on the underside of my prick.  I could see that her pussy
was sticky with her slippery girl juices.  She was flushed and breathing
hard.

   "I like this," she said, her voice low.

   She leaned forward and put her hands on my chest, which let her drag her
clit along my bumpy prick.  Again, she found the head with her hole, and
wiggled, forcing it between those flushed lips.

   In this position I could play with her tits again, and I made those
nipples stand out an inch as I pulled and pinched them.  She was moaning
again.

   Then, as I was trying to figure out how to get my mouth on those
nipples, and before I realized what she was doing, or could react, she
reached for my cock and lifted it as she stood up on her tip toes.  She
pulled the tip to flushed pussy lips, notched it, and then let her body
weight impale her on it.

   "Oh damn!" she gasped as her virginity was suddenly erased forever.

   "Jill!" I yelped.

   "Oh damn!" she groaned again.  "That hurts!  It's not supposed to hurt!"
Her eyes looked at me accusingly.

   "I'd have told you it hurts the first time ...  if you'd have asked me."

   "If I'd have asked you, you wouldn't have let me do this." She flexed
her legs, rising a little and three inches slid out of her.  She stopped as
if frozen and her eyes got wide.

   "That part doesn't feel so bad!" she yipped.  Very slowly she sat back
down.  She leaned forward and I could feel her pussy muscles flutter as she
experimented with them.  They loosened.  "Mmm it's better now," she
commented.  Then she stood up again, taking all but the head out of her. 
"Ooooo Bob, when it moves in me it feels good!"

   "You need to get off, baby," I said.  My voice was tight because her
pussy was tight and that sliding made me want to fertilize her teenaged
pussy.

   "It's better now," she said.  "I don't want to get off."

   "If you keep doing that I'm going to squirt," I panted.

   "But I don't want to get off," she complained.  She rose and fell
several more times.

   "You don't want to have a baby either!" I panted.  "And I'm about to
make one in you if you don't get off!"

   She sat down and rested.  I could feel the tip of my cock prying at her
cervix.

   "If I stop moving will that help?" she asked.  Her pussy muscles
squeezed me as she continued exploring and experimenting with them.

   "I don't think so," I gasped.  I felt a soothing leak of cum ooze
through my shaft.

   She leaned forward again and her eyes widened as she realized she could
put pressure on her clit with it inside her too.  She rubbed.

   "Oh PLEASE get off!" I almost sobbed.

   "Oh I don't think so, Bob," she gasped back at me.

   Her hips picked up speed as she figured out how to rub faster.  About
the time she started chanting "Oh shit ...  oh shit" my cock gave up and
the first long rope of spunk blew right straight into her womb.

   "Ahhhhhh!" she groaned.  "You squirted!  I can feel it!  Oh damn, Bob,
it's so hot!"

   My prick pulsed four more times as she started moving again, and she
wailed her happiness as she had her first orgasm from actual intercourse.
Her pussy knew what to do and it sucked me dry.  I didn't have a drop left
in me when she finally lay down on my chest, full of sperm and cock, and
panted.

   It was right then that a female voice broke the stillness that, up to
now, had only contained Jill's and my fevered panting.

   "Well, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed
it.  My little girl has FINALLY grown up!"

   "Mom!" yipped Jill, sitting back up.

   I turned my head to see Lynne, standing there in her work clothes, arms
folded, surveying her daughter's rapist.

   "Oh fuck," I groaned.

   Chapter Five

   "Mom!" squeaked Jill again.

   "Oh fuck," I sighed for a second time.  I was in deep trouble and I knew
it.

   "You didn't have to tell me you were fucking, Bob.  I could see that
plainly," said Lynne, again in a dry matter-of-fact voice.

   "I'm sorry," I whined.

   "It didn't look like you were all that sorry a minute ago," said the
woman.

   "Mom!" moaned Jill a third time.  For some reason she covered her
breasts with her hands.

   "Get off of him, Jill," her mother ordered.

   Jill, acting from habit, did what her mother told her to do.  She stood
up.  Oddly, I wasn't going soft.  I was still as hard as I'd ever been. 
The combination of the bench and my body was high enough off the ground
that she couldn't just lift a leg and swing it over.  As a result, she was
stuck as my rigid dick tried to stay in her.  By going up on her toes and
leaning forward she got it out of her.  There followed a gush of thick
white sperm that dripped onto my prick, making a mess.  She started crying
as she put her hands on my chest to help her get off and stand beside me.
She frantically groped for her clothes.

   "Get dressed and go on home," said Lynne.  "I need to talk to Bob."

   "It wasn't his fault, Momma," sobbed Jill.  "He told me not to."

   "Uh huh," said Lynne.  It was obvious she was a little doubtful about
that.  "You just get on home.  And sit on the toilet for a while, so as
much of that ...  stuff ...  will drain out of you as possible.

   Jill was blubbering but managed to get dressed as her mother seemed to
ignore her.  She forgot all about the motorcycle, though, and just took off
running as soon as she was dressed.  I struggled to sit up while Lynne just
stood there, watching me.

   "Aren't you a sight," she said calmly.  Her eyes went to my messy
crotch. "I never thought I'd see you like this, Bob."

   At that point there wasn't much I could do and I knew it.  I was pretty
much at her mercy, though I didn't expect much of that.  I was a little
embarrassed too.  I'd had a fantasy or two about Lynne, in the past, but
none of them approximated anything like this.  I had thought about being
naked with her ...  but not like this.

   "Come on," she said, nodding her head toward my house.  "Let's go get
you cleaned up."

   Now that was something I wasn't prepared for.

   "Huh?"

   "I can't talk to you when you look like that, and you can't get dressed
with all that ...  um ...  stuff ...  in your lap," she said.  "We're out
in the country.  Nobody can see you from the road.  Just get up and come
with me to the house.  You need a shower."

   "Look, Lynne," I started, but she held up a hand.

   "Clean up now ...  talk later," she said firmly.

   "Yes Ma'am," I said.  I stood up.

   Try to imagine taking a little stroll with a woman, in which she is
fully dressed, and you're naked, carrying your clothes, with your own cum
dripping off your peter and balls.  This stroll is in broad daylight,
across your yard, and the woman is walking beside you as if nothing was out
of the ordinary at all.

   Yeah, I can't imagine it either, and I DID it!

   She steered me into the house.  Of course she'd been there before on a
number of occasions, and knew where things were, so she more or less
shepherded me to the master bathroom that was attached to my bedroom, where
she opened the shower door and got the water going.  She turned around to
see me standing there, staring at her.  I was still holding my clothes.

   "You can wash the clothes separately, Bob," she said.  "Right now all
that needs to go in the shower is you."

   I was still out there, watching all this like my mind had left my body.
It was really quite interesting.  I watched myself be steered gently into
the shower.  She had to take the clothes out of my hands too.  The water
woke me up, because it was hot ...  too hot.  I yelped and reached for the
tap to mediate the temperature.  That took my mind off of the recent
circumstances for a few seconds, and I began to think again.  Since Jill
had taught me to shoot, I'd gotten more guns.  I now owned three rifles and
two handguns.  Since I was the only one living there, I didn't keep them in
a safe or anything.  I remembered that the nine millimeter pistol was lying
on the kitchen table where I'd left it after cleaning it.

   I had sudden visions of Lynne getting that gun and getting her own
justice by shooting me in the shower, where my body would be found days
later, dead of an apparent suicide out of remorse for what I'd done.  I was
thinking again, but not too clearly.

   The door to the shower opened and I actually flinched, pressing against
the wall to take what was coming to me.

   But what was coming to me wasn't a bullet.

   Lynne stepped into the shower stall with me ...  stark naked.  Her short
page boy hair went dark instantly as it got wet.  I stared.  Lynne was the
same height as Jill, and in the right circumstances they might even have
been mistaken for sisters, rather than mother and daughter, but her body
was more lush, somehow.  She worked hard running the orchard and spent a
lot of time outdoors.  There wasn't a spare ounce of fat on her body, and
she had well defined, though not unfeminine muscles under all that skin. 
Her breasts were full and round on the bottoms, but sloped on top.  I used
to call them ski jump breasts when I was younger, because the flesh came
swooping down her upper chest and then rose to nipples that were where the
imaginary skier would leave the ground.  Lynne's nipples were that dark
color that is almost black, perched on areolas that were the same color. 
Some part of my brain observed that those nipples were jutting out from
those areolas, erect as all getout.  My eyes slithered down to her groin,
where fluffy hair that matched her head was beginning to lie down against
her body as it got wet too.  My eyes took in rounded hips that, while
relatively unpadded, still looked distinctly feminine.

   "Lynne?" I blurted.

   "Who'd you think it would be?" she asked calmly.  "Are you going to
stand there all day, or get clean?"

   "What the heck is going on, Lynne?" I moaned.

   "We're getting you cleaned up, Bob," she said patiently.

   "But ...  but ...  but ..." The old vinyl record that was my voice at
that moment got stuck in a scratch.

   She ignored me and looked around for the soap.  She grabbed it and then
grabbed me, pulling me back under the spray.  She got behind me and then
started washing me.

   If the walk across the yard hadn't unhinged me, this almost did.  Her
hands, which I knew were rough and callused, felt baby soft as they slid
over my shoulders and down my arms.  Her hands went between my arms and
sides and she washed upwards into my arm pits.  I moved my hands out,
raising my arms automatically and her hands went on to my chest.

   That pulled her naked body up against mine and I felt those ski jump
breasts with their pebbly hard nipples press into my back.  I imagined
feeling that fluffy brown hair pushing against my naked butt too, even
thought I knew that hair wasn't fluffy any more.

   Her hands, one of which held the bar of soap, slid all over my chest and
stomach, sliding low enough that it grazed my pubic hair.  I had no idea
what was going on, but I still had visions of her wrath making me pay.  She
might not have long sharp fingernails, but her hands were as strong as a
man's and could crush my balls quite easily.  My butt pressed into her
instinctively as I tried to get my jewels away from the perceived danger.

   "Oh stop it!" she barked.  "I'm not going to hurt your precious
manhood."

   "Lynne?" I moaned.

   "I thought it was women who were supposed to be unable to shut up," she
growled.  "Didn't I tell you we'd talk AFTER you were cleaned up?" "Yes," I
choked out.

   "Then shut up, Bob.  Don't make this any more difficult than it already
is."

   "Yes Ma'am," I said automatically.

   Her hand darted to my balls so quickly that I didn't have time to react.
They squeezed firmly, but not harshly.

   "If you call me Ma'am one more time I AM going to do something
unpleasant to your precious manhood," she snapped.

   A mind in shock bounces back eventually, and mine started that uphill
climb towards what might be called rational thought.  I began to realize
that things were not as I had expected them to be.  Pretty smart guy, huh?

   "Um ...  before that I said your name and got in trouble for it," I
said. "What am I supposed to call you?"

   "You got in trouble because you were talking, not because you said my
name.  And you're STILL talking."

   I took the hint, finally, and shut up.

   Her hands rolled the bar of soap in them and the empty one went back to
my groin.  She washed my penis and balls as thoroughly as I could have.  My
butt pressed into her again and I tensed.  She didn't browbeat me any more.
She simply pressed her loins into my butt harder while the soap-filled hand
came up to my chest and pulled.  I found myself bending backwards slightly,
with my groin jutting out, being mauled by her hand.

   Then, suddenly, she was finished there and squatted to do my legs.  I
stood, mute and FINALLY figured out she wasn't as irate as I expected her
to be.  I turned around all by myself.  She bypassed my prick on the way
back up.  She put the soap back on the shelf and picked up my shampoo
bottle.  She didn't look into my eyes.  Her eyes were on what she was
doing. She manhandled my head under the spray and then pulled me back.  She
lathered up my hair, kneading it vigorously.  To my utter astonishment, as
I watched her breasts jiggle and bounce, I felt my prick starting to get
hard again.  She pushed me until my head was right under the shower head
and used her fingers to comb through my hair while she rinsed it.  Then she
got the soap again, and put it in my hand.

   "Now me," she said.

   =======================================

   My mind was back in session.  My first tentative touches to her body had
been met with her leaning into me.  It became blindingly obvious that she
wasn't there to punish me.  I've read my share of letters to Penthouse, and
stuff like that, so it wasn't any great leap for me to figure out that what
she'd seen had somehow excited her - a LOT.  I didn't understand how she
could get turned on by seeing me fuck her daughter, but by then I wasn't
about to question my very good luck.  I had been lucky enough to be Jill's
first, and now that luck had blossomed into an amazing flower, of sorts.

   I let my soapy hands slide onto those wonderful breasts.

   "Do you know why I'm here?" she asked as her chest pushed outward.

   That was a loaded question.  There was a really obvious answer, but
somehow I didn't think it was the right one to voice.  I just kept quiet.

   "There are actually two reasons," she said as my hands circled her
breasts over and over.  "The first is that I want Jill to go to college,
and if she falls in love with you, or you knock her up, that may not
happen."

   I stayed quiet.

   "The second is that it was supposed to be me instead of her, Bob."

   With an invitation like that I felt completely comfortable letting one
of my hands drop to begin 'washing' her between her legs.  She groaned.

   "Why the fuck didn't we do this years ago," she moaned.

   "I didn't know you'd be receptive," I said into her wet hair.

   "Fuck, Bob, after all those times I practically threw myself at you?"

   "You never threw yourself at me," I said, sliding a finger into her hot
sex.  Her knees bounced apart and she squatted a few inches, to give me
room.

   "I baked you all those cakes and pies," she groaned.

   "That was throwing yourself at me?" I grinned.  It felt good to grin,
after being so terrified.

   "I never baked anything for any other man besides Paul," she said,
leaning into me.  Her hands were on my thighs, just touching me there.

   "Paul was another reason I never ...  um ...  acted on my fantasies," I
said.

   "You had fantasies about me?" She sounded quite happy about that.

   "It didn't seem right ...  after he died."

   "He died, Bob.  I'm sorry about that.  I wish with all my heart he
hadn't, but he's gone.  It took me a few years to realize I didn't want to
spend the rest of my life alone."

   "You never did anything about it," I said.

   "How could I?" She wiggled her butt against my prick, which was hard as
stone again.  "I work too hard.  I didn't want to date.  I did what I
could. I baked you all those cakes and pies!"

   "You could have said something," I said.

   "Sure.  Young widow goes to older man who saved her farm by buying half
of it, and then never asked for a dime in return.  He's really going to
believe she's actually interested in him as a man."

   "You could have said you were interested in me as a man."

   "I DID!" she groaned.  "I baked you all those fucking cakes and pies!"

   She shook and panted.  I wasn't sure, but it was almost like she had an
orgasm ...  a little one, maybe.

   "Besides," she panted.  "How could I take up with you in front of Jill?
You've been like her grandpa."

   "Thanks," I said dryly.

   "Until today," she amended.

   My finger stopped.  "Are we talking now?" I asked.

   She turned around and kissed me.  There was no doubt of any kind that
she meant it either.  When she pulled back to breathe she stared into my
eyes.  I had never realized that her eyes were green, with flecks of brown
in them.

   "She's almost a woman," she said.  "I was beginning to think she might
have lesbian tendencies.  She's shown no interest in men at all until what
I saw today.  And I was there for a while, Bob.  I know you tried to slow
things down, and that she was the aggressor.  And even though the only
other man I've been naked with was Paul, I know enough about men to know
you didn't have a chance, once she set her sights on you.  She's loved you
for years, Bob.  You've been the only man in her life."

   "I still shouldn't have been so weak," I said.

   "She'd have done it with SOMEBODY sooner or later," said her mother. 
"If anything I'm glad it was you.  At least her first time was with a man
she loves, and who loves her too."

   "So why'd you run her off?" I asked.

   She snorted.  "I told you.  She needs to go to college.  Besides ...  do
you think I wanted her to see me do this?" she asked.  Her hand went to my
prick and she jacked on it a few times.  Then, abruptly, she sank to her
knees and her hot mouth engulfed my cock.  Her hand pushed the foreskin
back and she sucked on the knob.  She pulled off with a slurping sound.

   "Oh Bob, I've wanted to do that for so long."

   "I love that," I sighed.  "But right now there's someplace else I'd like
to slide that into."

   She stood up and kissed me.  Then she turned the water off.

   "That could be kind of risky," she said.  "I'm not on anything, and,
knowing your sexual practices, I doubt you have a condom.  You've already
risked knocking up one of the Simmons girls today.  Are you sure you want
to go for two?"

   "Would you let me?" I asked.

   Her answer was instant.  "Right now I can't remember being this horny,
Bob, and I'm not the one going to college."

   Chapter Six

   Jill was very unhappy, initially.  Her mother clamped down on her,
insisting that romance came after college, instead of before it.  Lynne
knew that wouldn't hold up, and that once Jill got to school, where she
could do what she wanted, she would most likely find a boy to be interested
in.  So she also got her daughter on birth control.

   She didn't banish me from their house.  Nor did she try to impose some
irrational rule about Jill not being allowed to come to my house.  She just
sat us all down and explained that, while all this interest in me as a man
was normal ...  even laudable in her opinion ...  it just wasn't timed
right.

   "So I can have sex with Bob when I graduate?" asked a very pragmatic
Jill.

   Lynne was a bit startled at the boldness of her daughter's question, but
she was caught.

   "I suppose you could ...  yes."

   "Except that you're going to have sex with him while I'm gone," said
Jill, who looked thoughtful, rather than upset about that idea.

   "I didn't say that," said Lynne, but she couldn't suppress the rosy tint
that suddenly stained her cheeks.

   "I know how you feel about him," said Jill carelessly.  "Why do you
think I started thinking about him that way?"

   "I never said I was thinking about him that way!" objected Lynne.

   I just sat there, fascinated by what I was seeing.

   "You didn't have to," said Jill.  "I could see it in your face when we
talked about him.  You like him a lot, Mom."

   "Well ...  what's not to like?" objected Lynne.  "He's a thoughtful,
nice man."

   "Yeah," said Jill.  "Right." The sarcastic tone in her voice caused her
mother to look at her sharply and Jill's hands came up to ward off a
scolding.  "He is that," she admitted in a normal tone.  "But one of the
important parts of that is that he's a MAN."

   "I don't think that way about just any nice guy," said Lynne, frowning.

   "Me either," said Jill.  "I might be young, and I know I never had a
boyfriend, but I didn't choose Bob just because he was the only man handy.
I like him too, Mom."

   "That's not the point!" barked Lynne.  "The point is you need to go to
college and get your degree before you muck up your life with a man."

   "I know that," said Jill just as stridently.  "What I'm trying to tell
you is that I understand how you feel about him!  It's OK, Mom.  I don't
mind if you borrow him while I'm gone to college."

   "Borrow him?" Lynne's voice finally suggested she was losing control.  I
didn't want this to turn into a shouting match.  I decided to say
something.

   "Don't I get a say in this?" I asked.

   Both women just looked at me, frowning.  Neither said a word.

   "I'm too old for you," I said bravely, to Jill.

   "I know that," she snapped.  "That doesn't change the way I feel about
you."

   "You'll meet some nice boy at college and fall in love with him," I
said.

   "I know that too," she said firmly.  "YOU're the one who taught me how
interesting men can be.  I'm quite sure there will be interesting men at
college too.  That also doesn't change the way I feel about you."

   "So what do you want then?" I asked, knowing how Lynne must be feeling.

   "All I'm trying to say is that I understand how Mom can feel the same
way about you!" she almost yelled.  "I have to go to the bathroom now!" She
got up and almost stomped out of the room.

   I looked at Lynne, who stared at me.  I shrugged and then spoke.  "Well
...  all things considered ...  I think that went pretty well."

   Lynne just rolled her eyes at me.

   ====================================

   The harvest went very well, though there were some odd parts to it. 
When all those high school boys showed up to pick apples, Jill wore work
shirts.  I could see the impression of the bra straps through the back of
it.  She also wore jeans every day, instead of shorts.  The boys looked
anyway, of course, and flirted with her mercilessly.  She seemed to take it
in stride, being neither catty about it, or dismissive.  She also managed
to rebuff them without causing any dissention.  I was both amazed and
impressed.

   The boys also stared at Lynne a lot.  I understood that perfectly. 
Obversly to her daughter, she didn't seem to notice their attention.  The
only sad thing was that Jill's birthday came right in the middle of
harvest, and we couldn't stop to celebrate it.  She said she didn't mind,
but it was one of those momentous birthdays and I know Lynne felt bad about
it.

   We shipped three truckloads that year.  When the last one rolled out of
the yard, and Lynne had paid off the temporary help, the three of us walked
back to the house to have a piece of pecan pie.  The relief of being done
with harvest was palpable and I found myself holding hands with both of
them.

   Sitting at the table, as I took my first bite I glanced over at Lynne.
She was looking at me, her first bite on the tip of a fork that was
suspended between her plate and partly open mouth.  We just stared for a
few seconds.

   "Good grief, you two.  Get a room!" moaned Jill.

   Her mother looked over at her.  "I beg your pardon?"

   "Harvest is over.  I know what you want.  And if you're silly enough not
to take it, then I know what I want too."

   "What are you talking about?" Lynne tried to bluff.

   Jill took a bite of pie and then casually pointed the tines of the fork
at her mother's chest.  Lynne looked down.  Even in the heat of summer, her
nipples could be seen jutting through the bra and shirt she was wearing.

   "I know what it means when mine do that," said Jill calmly.

   Lynne sat back in her chair and slumped.

   "Where did my baby girl go?" she moaned.

   "To college, Mom," said the girl in question.  "In just three weeks, in
fact.  Get used to it.  Except that I'm not gone yet and I'm just as glad
that harvest is over as you are and just as horny as you are too.  I've
been on the pill for over a month now, so if you're not going to take
advantage of the opportunity ..."

   "I do not believe this!" moaned Lynne.

   "You could just look at it like it's my birthday party," suggested Jill,
looking at me with eyes that were clearly lustful.

   I think that first time, when Lynne saw Jill choose to deflower herself
on me, there was so much shock, mixed with so much relief that Jill was
actually interested in men after all, that it got Lynne through the
incident.  She had definitely been turned on in the shower and our
lovemaking afterwards, in my bed, had been practically athletic as
suppressed passion exploded from both of us.

   But now, after time to reflect on all this, Lynne just wasn't ready to
think about her 'baby girl' being sexually active ...  not with me anyway,
and maybe not at all.

   At the same time I suspect that older women are aware that all
eighteen-year-old girls are horny, and that they have to do SOMETHING to
deal with it.  At any rate, Lynne didn't seem to be concerned that her
daughter had an itch that needed to be scratched.

   "I'm sending you to college for your birthday," said Lynne archly.  "And
it's quite possible to remedy your ... condition ... without having sex."

   She stood up as if her knees were made of spring steel.  Her hand
reached for my arm and my second bite of pecan pie flipped off the fork to
splat on the table.

   "Would you get that please, Jill?" she said, her voice strained.  Then
she was pulling me toward her bedroom.

   I wanted to giggle as I heard Jill's dour voice softly say "Do as I say,
not as I do!" in a parody of her mother's voice.

   But there was no heat in her comment.

   ==================================

   Lynne, it turned out, could have an orgasm simply by having her ski jump
nipples sucked.  Or maybe she just had ten years of sexual neglect to make
up for.  At any rate, once she got me into the bedroom she was wild as she
got us both stripped.  We were both still sweaty from work, but there was
no shower this time.  Instead she seemed to crave the taste of the salt on
my skin.  Her kisses were interrupted by tours of my body with her lips. 
My prick was included, and got sucked briefly, but lovingly before she
moved on, until I was crazy with my own desire and manhandled her onto her
back.  Her eyes went to my prick, which was hanging an inch above her
swollen pussy lips.

   "I want that in me," she whispered.

   I sagged, until the tip touched those engorged lips.

   Her hand went to it and held it steady as I sagged some more.  She
groaned as I slid in.

   "I want this a lot," she gasped.

   Maybe all men are pigs, because what I thought about for just a few
seconds was that another woman in the house had wanted this too.  I
wondered what Jill was doing just then.  I later found out she had a hair
brush with a long, fat handle and, ever since feeling my prick in her,
she'd been fucking herself with it regularly.  She'd learned to fuck with
one hand, while rubbing her clit with the other, and could get an orgasm
whenever she wanted it.  At that time I would have thought that since she'd
only had a prick in her one time in her life, she didn't yet know what she
was missing all that much.  I would also find out, much later, that there
were times when Jill PREFERRED that hairbrush to the real thing.  It's not
what you have, but how you use it that really matters, as things turn out.

   Anyway, I got back to thinking about the woman I was with, and commenced
to try to wring as many orgasms out of her as I could before my hard-on
wore out.

   Lynne was very cooperative in bed.  It didn't take her long to figure
out how much I loved knowing I'd made her cum and her natural reaction was
to tell me about it each time she reached orgasm.  She had a bit of a kinky
potty mouth about it, gasping about how my thick prick was making her pussy
squirt, and things like that.  And, when she recognized that I was close,
she didn't tell me to stop, or last longer.

   "You gonna cum, Bob?" she whined.  "You gonna shoot that thing off in my
pussy?  Mmmmm I can't wait to feel it, Bob.  I want to feel it!  Let me
feel it now!"

   Her daughter was on the pill.  I assumed she had started taking them
too, so it never occurred to me to pull out.  Instead, I went deep and
flushed her full of what seemed like a year's collection of sperm cells.

   ======================================

   Jill was nowhere to be found when we finally walked out of the bedroom.
It turned out she'd gone for a ride on her horse.  There was a note on the
table, tucked under my now empty plate.

   So Lynne took me back to the bedroom, where she demanded that I help her
strip the bed.  She put the sweat-stained sheets in the washer and THEN
pulled me into the shower again.

   This time was even better than the last time, even though her shower was
smaller than mine.  Who'd have believed a man in his forties could still
get it up only twenty minutes after he'd cum?  And, since the bed hadn't
been made yet, I experimented with figuring out how to do it in the shower.

   That was interesting.  It used a heck of a lot of water, because we
could go a very long time standing up like that.  Eventually, though, I was
able to give her another dose of my pent up semen while our lips were
welded together in a passionate kiss.

   ====================================

   You've heard about the elephant in the room?  It wasn't quite like that
at supper, when we were all together at that table again.  Everybody seemed
perfectly happy pretending like that sexual interlude hadn't happened.  I
had wanted to go on home, but Lynne asked me to stay, saying she wouldn't
know what to say to Jill if they were alone.  Instead, Jill asked about the
financial status of the farm, now that the apples were gone.  Lynne hadn't
yet done the books so we kind of rushed through supper.  I followed them to
the desk and watched as Lynne caught the books up to date.  We had to use
estimated weights, since the apples hadn't been officially weighed yet, but
even when she estimated low it looked like she'd make a substantial profit
that year.

   =================================

   They say time flies when you're having fun.  And Lynne and I WERE having
fun, now that she'd gotten used to the idea that she could have a man in
her life - intimately - and it wouldn't ruin her relationship with her
daughter.  Even so, we tended to wait as long as possible, until we just
couldn't stand it, which meant we only had sex maybe twice a week. 
Sometimes she'd come to my house.  My impression that watching me deflower
her daughter ...  or watching her daughter deflower herself on me ...  had
gotten her going was confirmed.  Twice, when she dropped in to see me, she
pulled me to the barn, and got her ashes hauled there, on the same bench
Jill and I had used.  Or maybe she was marking her territory or something.
In any case, I left blankets all around the place, because when the mood
struck her, she wanted it then and there, wherever there was.  On the other
hand, whenever it was at her house, she always took me to her bed.

   And Jill seemed to cope rather well.  She still came around, but she
didn't throw herself at me.  I can't say she didn't tease me at all.  I
remember three times in particular when she said she had to go home and put
her arms around my neck and kissed me before she left.  Those were sizzling
kisses.  She gave me another one of those just before she got in the car so
Lynne could drive her to college.  That one was right in front of her
mother, and it was obviously not just a friendly little "see you later and
thanks for everything" kiss.

   Not to be outdone, Lynne got out of the car and kissed me goodbye
herself.

   With both her hands on my ass.

   =================================

   A writer acquaintance of mine says that this is where an epilogue should
logically go, but there's no real transition point in my story to separate
it, so I'll just tell you what happened.

   Jill did just fine in college.  She was a smart girl to begin with, and
living on a farm had taught her the kind of self discipline that comes in
handy when you need to study instead of party.

   For her mother and me it went a little less smoothly, depending on how
you look at things.  We were like teenagers ourselves, and with Jill gone
and nobody else to see us we did some goofy things.

   Like for instance there was the time that Lynne got on Jill's horse and
rode over to my place wearing only a wig she made herself out of yarn.  She
introduced herself to me as Lady Godiva.  I was on top of her in the barn,
just fucking her like crazy when Dennis, the rural route mail man tried to
deliver a package to me.  We heard him yelling my name and went still. 
Thankfully he just left it on the porch, instead of coming into the barn.

   Not to be outdone, I got one of those plastic swimming pools that are
for kids and filled it up.  She was due to come to my house that night and
I was waiting in it, naked, when she got there.

   "Wanna go skinny dipping?" I asked, trying to affect a cultured voice.

   She did, as it turned out, want to go skinny dipping.  She also wanted
to see what it was like in Jill's tree house, and on the tractor.  As I
said, she was very inventive.

   It was all fun and games for us.  We were able to let ourselves go as if
we were young again.  The only sadness was that Jill had gotten a job at
school and couldn't come home for Thanksgiving, though she promised she'd
be there for Christmas.

   At our private Thanksgiving dinner I tried to cheer Lynne up by asking
her what she wanted for Christmas.

   "I already have it," she said softly.

   "Besides me," I joked.

   Her look was very serious, though, and the grin faded from my face.  "I
didn't ask you if I could have it," she said.  "I should have, but I got a
little crazy and just ...  um ...  sort of took it.  Now I'm afraid you'll
be mad."

   "Anything I have is yours," I said.  I was being honest.  She could have
asked me for anything and I'd have given it to her.  I had never expected
to fall in love again, and I was on cloud nine most of the time.

   "Even your sperm?" she asked quietly.

   "Especially my sperm," I joked, leering at her.

   She didn't smile.

   "This is no laughing matter, Bob.  I wish it were, but it's not."

   She took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and then took another
smaller lungful of air to speak.

   "I'm pregnant, Bob."

   Chapter Seven

   "I'm pregnant, Bob."

   Her words rang in my ears with multiple tones.  There was the
bone-vibrating toll of the big bell, and the jangle of thousands of bicycle
bells, puctuated by the sharp ding of the hotel service bell rung over and
over again, all overlayed with the crying of a million babies.

   At the very same time there was a long silence as I stared at her with
eyes that I know had to be as big around as saucers.  Part of what made
losing Vicky so bad was the fact that we'd wanted children, and when she
died that dream died too.  I had gotten so used to the idea that my name
would die out when I left this earth that the concept that it might not
seemed momentous.

   "I should have gotten on the pill," she said.  "I even meant to, at
first, but I kept putting it off until all of a sudden I didn't want to be
on the pill any more.  I'm sorry, Bob.  I took advantage of you." There
were tears in her eyes now and she looked thoroughly miserable.

   "You have to marry me," I blurted.

   "That's not necessary, Bob," she said, but she smiled.

   "No, I mean it.  You have to marry me."

   "Bob, honey, don't you think you're being a little hasty?  I'd be
honored to be your wife, but we've only been ...  um ...  seeing each other
...  for a few months.  It's kind of soon for that kind of talk, don't you
think?

   "It wasn't too soon for you to get pregnant," I said.  "And we've known
each other a lot longer than a few months.  We're not likely to get to know
each other any better than we already do unless we live together.  Do you
want to move in with me?"

   That "move in with me" line sounded so silly to me that I know I grinned
a goofy grin.

   "Of course not," she said, quite seriously.  "But you don't have to do
the right thing, Bob.  I knew what I was doing.  I LET you get me
pregnant."

   "What if I WANT to do the right thing?" I asked peevishly.  "What if I
love you and want more than one child."

   "Do you?" she asked.

   I didn't hesitate.

   "Yes!"

   Now it was her eyes that got saucer sized.

   "Really, Bob?"

   "I love you!" I almost yelled.  "I've probably loved you for years, but
wouldn't admit it, even to myself.  You're going to have my baby!  Of
course I want to marry you."

   And then there was a bunch of crying and laughing and belly feeling and,
eventually, gentle lovemaking.  It was after that, while we were cuddling,
that she asked a tough question.

   "What about Jill?"

   "You think she'll be unhappy at getting a brother or sister?"

   "I have a feeling she'll be unhappy that it's not my granddaughter
instead," she said.

   "She was just curious," I said.  "She doesn't want to marry the likes of
me."

   "Don't be so sure," said Lynne.  "I know my daughter pretty well.  You
do too, for that matter.  She would never have done what she did with you
unless she thought about it first.  She DECIDED to seduce you, Bob.  She
loves you too, just like me." She blinked.  "JUST like me, Bob."

   "Well I'm not Mormon, so having multiple wives is out, regardless of how
delightful that might be," I said.

   I got a punch in the ribs for that.

   "What if she DOES want to come back to you after school?" asked Lynne.

   "Maybe we'd better ask her," I said.

   ========================================

   Lynne must have really been worried about that, because she
procrastinated until it was too late.  When Jill bounced into the house for
Christmas break, Lynne's belly was already pooching.  Since it would
eventually come out anyway, she didn't hide it.

   I never did get a completely lucid account of how that went, exactly.  I
know it was very emotional for both of them.  It was probably good I wasn't
there, because both women were at a fever pitch, emotionally, until things
calmed down, and while I don't think it would have gotten ugly, it might
have been very awkward.

   Eventually, though, Jill got on board with having a half sister.  She
was absolutely sure it would be a sister, since she decided having a
brother would be unacceptable.  When I DID come in, Jill kissed me just as
hard and passionately as any kiss we'd had before.  When that kiss was
finished she blinked.

   "There were times I had dreams that you got me pregnant, Bob.  I'm very
disappointed with you now."

   "Then I don't want to be around you when you're happy with me," I
sighed. I gave her a little hug and then pushed her away.

   After that she was her old bouncy self, though she didn't tease me any
more.  She spent a lot of time with her mother, of course, but with their
heads together, and talking quietly, I wasn't aware of what they were
sharing.  Girl stuff, probably.

   Lynne and I got married before Jill went back to school.  It was a small
private ceremony, with only Jill as a witness.  She bawled, but insisted
she was happy.

   I moved into Lynne's house after we were married, mostly because it was
easier for me to move than it was for her to do that.  Her house was newer,
and she didn't have to get used to a new arrangement.  Plus I didn't care,
so it worked out.  I still went over to my house every so often to make
sure things were kept up.  We thought about renting it out, but never
seemed to get around to it.  I didn't want to sell it, though I had no idea
what to do with it.  I suppose I looked at it as an investment of sorts.  I
kept up the horse boarding, because I liked doing that, but I gave up the
garden.  Lynne had her own vegetable garden, and I transferred my love of
gardening to that.

   Darren Paul MacAllister was born on the third of July the next year. 
Jill pretended to be furious, but she wasn't really.  She spent some time
holding the little tyke, but only in the evenings.  She was busy during the
days being in charge of the apple harvest that year, since when she got
home for the summer her mother was so gravid.

   If anything, the high school boys were even more breathless in their
appreciation for this sophisticated, beautiful college woman who wore such
tantalizingly brief halter tops and tight shorts.  She no longer tried to
be modest around them.  I know that a gallon of sperm was shot into
underwear or tissues that summer by boys who went home from picking apples
too tired to do anything but beat off.

   A couple of months after she went back to school Jill called and
announced that she'd finally met a man who she didn't just want to strangle
after she'd known him a few months.  She'd actually met him the previous
year, but nothing developed until she got back to school and he told her
how much he'd missed her over the summer.  She brought him to Thanksgiving
dinner that year.  His name was Jackson Parks and he seemed like a nice
guy, though I had to force myself to give him a break.  If Jill liked him
then it was my duty to like him.  She spent most of her time with him or
her mother.  But, just before they got in the car to go back to school, she
cornered me in the pantry.  She put her arms loosely around my neck, and
pushed her loins against mine.

   "He's not you, but he's got a lot of your attributes," she said, with
her lips about half an inch from mine.  Then she kissed me with one of
those bell ringing kisses.

   After her first two years were complete Jill settled into a major in
agriculture with emphasis on orchard management.  I wasn't surprised, but
her mother was astonished.  Lynne had thought the last thing Jill would
ever want to do was manage an orchard.  When Jill said she'd just take over
the family business when Lynne got "old and infirm" as she put it, her
mother was ecstatic.

   When Jill came home for the summer Lynne was pregnant again.  It didn't
make any difference to the harvest this time, though, and Lynne just
naturally took the lead again.  Jill didn't seem to mind.  I actually got
to spend more time with her that summer, as we did the same kinds of
things, preparing for the harvest, that we'd done when she was a girl.  She
didn't throw any apples at me, of course, and I didn't attack her naked
pussy.

   I have to admit we both thought about it, though.  One evening we were
sitting on the porch.  It was dark, and late and we were just enjoying the
cool air.

   "I miss Jack," she said.  "I'm horny."

   I tried to avoid the obvious subject.  "So it's Jack now, instead of
Jackson?"

   "Since we got halfway serious everybody kids us about being Jack and
Jill, so I call him Jack now."

   I lost the battle of trying not to care.

   "So Jack ...  um ...  takes care of you when you get horny?" I asked,
feeling my groin stir with the kind of voyeuristic interest most men would
recognize.

   She gave me a level look.  "Of course he takes care of me," she said. 
"Mom said I can't have you.  What else was I supposed to do?"

   "Wow," I sighed.

   "What?" she asked.

   "It's just weird to think of you ...  doing that ...  with some other
guy."

   "How does it make you feel?" she asked.  I could hear the interest in
her voice.

   "It makes me feel like breaking something," I admitted.

   "Good," she said smugly.

   "Is that how you feel when you think about your mother and me?" I asked.

   "No," she said carelessly.  "I'm happy for Mom.  I just want you too,
that's all."

   "That's kind of weird too," I said.

   "Why?" she asked.  "If it was OK with Mom, you'd fuck me in a New York
Minute, wouldn't you?"

   That made me uncomfortable for a few seconds, because she was right, and
I didn't think I was supposed to be that much of a slut, or whatever you
call a man who's like that.

   "I guess I would," I said slowly.  "Except that it ISN'T OK with her."

   "And I respect that," she said.  "Even though, technically, I got you
first." She shrugged.  "Anyway, I like Jack a lot.  I'm not sure if I love
him or not.  I'm not sure what love feels like.  I know I don't feel about
him the way I feel about you, but I think maybe you're special somehow."

   "Thanks," I said, not sure if I was actually thankful or not.

   ===================================

   Jill got to be there for the birth of her sister.  I had done the Lamaze
thing with Lynne when she had Darren, so I was ready for the next one. 
Jill was passionately interested, and the Doctor said she could watch, so
she was there for the labor, which only lasted six hours, and for the
delivery, at which she wielded the movie camera but only got fleeting shots
of her sister emerging because she was too fascinated with watching the
process outside the viewfinder.

   Jill gave mixed reviews later, when we were back home.  She said there
was a time during the process when she thought that if I'd have gotten her
pregnant, and she'd had to go through what she'd just seen, she'd have
hated me forever.  Fifteen minutes later she was holding her baby sister,
wondering aloud what it would feel like to have a baby sucking at her
nipple.

   That night she teased me for the first time in a long time.  When she
was ready for bed, she showed me a huge knobbed dildo, waving it slowly in
front of my face.

   "This is what I have to settle for because I came home for the summer,"
she said.  She licked the tip.  "Its name is Timmy." She grinned when she
saw me blush.  "Jack's not this big, or this knobby, but I actually like
him better."

   "That's nice," I croaked.

   She tilted her head and blinked at me several times.  "I still remember
you being even better.  It would be nice if I could find out if my memory
is accurate about that.  Maybe I should ask Mom if I can do that, hmmmm?"

   I realized then that she was teasing me and slapped her hard on the
butt.

   "Off to bed with Timmy, you wanton wench!" I said firmly.

   She laughed, but her eyes told me plainly that if I'd have let her,
she'd have tried to get her mother to loan me out that night.  She didn't
do that the rest of the summer, and Jackson actually came to see her for a
few days during harvest.  She put him to work with the rest of the help,
but I'm sure he got some special compensation during the nights.  Jill
spent the rest of the summer trying to teach Darren to say "Jill" and
taking care of little Emily's simple newborn needs.

   That August I got another one of those once or twice a year passionate
kisses from Jill, just before she drove back to school.

   "Thanks for loving my mother," she said.  She rubbed the front of her
jeans against me gently.  "And thanks for giving her the chance to be a
mommy again.  I'll always love you for that."

   "I'll always love you because you're you," I said.

   "You shouldn't say things like that to me," she pouted.  "It makes me
want to take my clothes off and attack you."

   "Jackson's waiting for you.  You'd better go," I said gently.

   "He'd better be," she sighed.  "I may have to rub twice before I even
get back, thanks to you."

   "What did I do?" I asked.

   "You were just yourself," she said, sticking her tongue out at me.

   Then she was off for another year of school.  I wondered what life would
be like if she ever did actually come back and live on the farm again. 
That had the potential for being tense.

   ==================================

   I suspected Jill was a lot fonder of Jack than she let on, and that was
confirmed when, at Christmas that year, they came to stay for a week and
she gleefully showed off a shiny diamond on her left ring finger.  He was
an Ag major too, and came from a family that farmed corn and hogs, down in
Nebraska.

   Lynne was pregnant with our third - and last - child, but was only two
months along and wasn't really showing yet.  That didn't matter though,
because Jill had some kind of radar.  As soon as her mother was finished
oooing and ahhhing over the engagement ring Jill looked at her and said
"Again!?  Now I know why I can't keep my legs closed either!"

   Jack had the style to blush, which got him up another notch on my scale.
A lot of guys would have strutted after their girlfriend said something
like that, but he was made of better stuff than that.

   At dinner that night there was a lot of planning.  Jill wanted to run
the orchard, or at least have most of the responsibility.  She suggested
that Jack could resurrect the cattle operation too, something he was
anxious to explore.

   Lynne leaned back in her chair.

   "I'll welcome your help with the orchard, and I have no problem
whatsoever if Jack wants to be a rancher, but you can't live with us." She
glanced at me.

   "I suppose I could rent them my place," I said.

   "Would you really?" Jill squealed.

   I kept my face straight.  "I might even make you a deal, seeing as how
you're family and all."

   I got another kiss from Jill, and her intended took great interest in
how forceful it was.  Jill acted like it was nothing at all, and just
danced around.

   ==================================

   We didn't rent it to them, of course.  It was their wedding present,
along with a third ownership of the orchard.  It seemed like getting her
grandfather's land back into the family officially was the only way to go.
At least to me.

   They dove right in, which meant they were both so busy that what might
have been awkward didn't materialize.  Jill and her mother handled that
year's apple harvest, and at the same time Jill started a hundred and fifty
new trees, in five new varieties that were able to survive very dry
conditions better than what we already had.  I loaned Jack some money to
get a herd started, and he took that seriously, spending more time than was
really necessary with them as they got established on our range.

   Whether it was by design or chance, Jill didn't get pregnant for a year
and a half.  By then she had lots of experience with our little ones.  As
it turned out, I was the first person she told.

   I was working on the tractor, thinking as I usually did that I should
just buy a new one, and I sensed her presence just before I smelled that
fruity scent that she still used.  I turned around.

   "You're all greasy and icky," she said, looking at my stained hands.

   "Want me to leave some handprints on your butt so Jack will pay more
attention to you?" I joked.

   "He pays plenty of attention to me," she said, her face straight.  "I'm
pregnant, Bob."

   I don't know what went across my face, but the stab of something that I
had to admit was jealousy flashed through my body.  Maybe it showed,
because she looked satisfied at my reaction.

   "It could have been your baby, you know," she said.

   I spent a few seconds evaluating whether she was teasing me, or trying
to tell me something.  It didn't really matter.  What we had had was
something neither of us would ever forget, but it was in the past.

   "It's better that it's his," I said.

   "I know," she said.  "I just want you to know I still wish it was yours
...  a little bit.  Does that make me a terrible wife?"

   "I don't think so," I said, wiping my hands on a rag.  "I kind of wish
it was mine too.  Does that make me a terrible step father?"

   "I don't think of you as my step father," she said.  "I just think of
you as Bob." She tilted her head and stared at me.  "And I think I'll
probably be in love with you my whole life."

   This was getting on the edge of possibly having bad consequences, and I
tried to lighten the mood.

   "Well that's good, because I'll probably be half in love with you until
I'm old and gray too."

   "You're already old and gray," she said.

   "I am wounded!" I shot back.

   "But you made my mother gloriously happy," she said, ignoring my
posturing.  "And that counts for more than anything else.  Thank you." She
was very serious, so I quit joking.

   "I love her too," I said.

   "I know.  That's why I decided to behave myself and try to find another
man."

   Again, I didn't know if she was trying to tell me something or not. 
"And did you?"

   The smile that blossomed on her face was a beaming grin.

   "I DID!" she squealed.  Her hands went to her stomach, which looked like
it always had, below a halter top.  "And he knocked me up!  And I wanted
you to be the first to know because you're the only other man in the whole
world who might have gotten to do that."

   "You should have told your mother first," I said.

   "She'll think I did," she said, still grinning.  "Won't she." It was an
order and not a question.

   "She will," I agreed.

   She gave me what could only be described as a chaste kiss on one cheek.
"I'm going to go tell her now.  Give us five minutes, and then come in to
wash your hands and be all surprised."

   "Yes Ma'am," I said.

   ===============================

   Lynne took it much harder than either Jill or I expected.  She was
ecstatic for Jill, and I could hear them squealing like girls in high
school as I went in to "wash my hands." But by the time I had been informed
(and was suitably surprised) Lynne had had time to think about it long
enough that she wailed "I'm too young to be a grandmother!" Jack and Jill
took our three out to get ice cream that evening, so I could convince
"Grandma" that you're as young as you feel.  It was the best sex we'd had
in a long time, and that's saying something.

   ================================

   For whatever reason getting pregnant changed Jill's relationship with
me. She never teased me again, and I never got another one of those bell
ringing kisses.  The closeness was still there, but the sexual tension was
missing from it.  I got wonderful hugs, and she wasn't shy about her good
parts contacting my good parts, but she didn't rub against me any more. 
She would lean against me on cold winter evenings as we cuddled a child or
two, watching TV or a movie, but I didn't worry about getting an erection
about it.  It was kind of bittersweet, in a way, because her memory was
precious to me, but the fantasy of renewing that memory had slipped away.

   Love is like that.  If someone tells you you can only love one person,
tell them they're full of it.  Falling in love is easy.  It's making things
work with all the people you fall in love with that's the challenge.  And
love makes you sacrifice some things, for the benefit of those you love. 
That part is pretty rough sometimes too.

   But it's worth it, if you can keep the love in the appropriate context.
Not only do you get to keep loving someone ...  it can get a granddaughter
named after you.

   Roberta Lynne Parks will learn about that some day, when she's old
enough to ask about where she got her name.

   The End












   


  
orchard_flower_alpha-complete