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  GIVE AND TAKE

  “How do I know you would pay me, Carole?”

  “Because I said I would.”

  “And how do I know you’ve got that kind of money?”

  “I’ve got it — and more.”

  He leaned closer to her and the woman-smell around her made his head throb.

  “You said you’d be nice to me,” he reminded her.

  “Did I?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  Her face colored slightly. “I didn’t mean it quite the way you took it.”

  “You want me to do something for you, and I want something from you if I do it. And I don’t mean just money.”

  She got up and walked around restlessly. Then she came back.

  “You drive a hard bargain,” she said.

  She reached out and stroked one of his arms. Her hand was soft — like so much of her would be soft …

  ORRIE HITT

  UNTAMED LUST

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Give and Take

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Pushover

  Also Available

  Copyright

  1

  IT WAS very hot as Eddie Boyd turned off the highway into the private road which led to Wildwood Acres. He didn’t mind it — Eddie had worked on farms all his life, and the beating rays of the midday sun were as familiar to him as his body.

  Midday — he didn’t have a watch, but a glance at the sun told him that it must be nearly time for his noon appointment with Frank Jennings. He lengthened his stride and urged his protesting leg muscles into a quicker rhythm. Joan Kelder had told him that the master of Wildwood expected people to be prompt for appointments.

  Eddie yawned as he tramped doggedly along the gravel road. He was bone-weary. Every inch of his six-foot-six frame seemed weighted with lead. His landlady, Mrs. Norton, had locked him out of his room the night before — he owed a month’s rent — and he had “camped out” on the riverbank. But it had been years since the last time he had slept on the ground and the discomfort, along with worry over his broke and jobless state, had permitted him little rest.

  Joan, who worked as a maid at Wildwood Acres, had recommended him for a sort of gamekeeper’s job that was open there. He hoped fervently that he could land it. If he missed this one, he would be in pretty desperate shape — none of the farms were hiring at this time of year, and he knew no other work. He compressed his lips, shook his head and determined to make the best possible impression on Jennings.

  “He’s a funny guy,” Joan had explained two nights earlier, when she had stayed with Eddie in town. “On nice mornings, he sits out on the lawn in his wheelchair. Afternoons he gets drunk. I suppose he’s trying to forget he can’t walk any more. Then, when he’s really potted, he gets the caretaker to push him down into the woods, and he blasts away with a shotgun at anything he sees. Sometimes he makes his wife go along. She hates it. She’s young and pretty — I wonder how he got her. I guess she married him for his money.”

  Joan had offered to pay Eddie’s room rent and to help him out until he turned up a source of income, but he had declined. She was saving for a divorce, and every dollar counted. Her husband was in prison, and Eddie knew only too well how desperately anxious she was to be free. She had quit a job at the local diner a couple of months earlier because she hadn’t been able to put anything aside, and had gone into domestic service. At Wildwood she got room and board and forty dollars a week, and now her divorce fund was growing steadily. Joan was giving Eddie her body and her love — he was taking enough from her without dipping into her precious divorce money.

  “All I want is to get free of Paul and marry you,” she often told him. Eddie was uneasy when she mentioned marriage and was careful not to commit himself, not at all sure his own feelings went quite so far. He had known Joan since she was sixteen and he eighteen, five years ago. He and his father had been working a rented farm, and she had been living with an aunt on the next farm, going to school and helping with chores.

  It had taken him nearly a year to start making any progress with her. Then, one rainy day, they had been alone in the barn, up in the hay where they had gone to look for eggs. They had fallen to wrestling, squealing like children as they tickled each other’s ribs. Joan had been wearing faded blue jeans and an old blue cotton work shirt, the tails knotted together in front. Neither of them noticed that the knot worked loose until Eddie pinned her down, kissed her playfully, and suddenly grabbed for her ribcage to tickle her again. His face flamed and a hot wave of sensation flushed through him as he found himself holding a warm, soft handful of swelling breast. Instead of letting go instantly, Eddie had followed a sudden impulse to kiss her again, stifling her gasp of protest with his lips. In a moment her arms tightened around him and she was returning his kiss wildly. But then she stiffened and broke partly free, whimpering that they mustn’t, they mustn’t. Little by little, however, he gained ground, as she yielded to his imploring lips and hands in the age-old ritual of seduction. The memory was so vivid that now, five years and innumerable nights of love later, he could recall every image, sound and sensation — the shiver that had coursed down his spine when he had parted her shirt and had seen the glossy perfection of her breasts; her gasp of indrawn breath as he had fondled her flesh; her wild little cry of mingled pleasure and pain as he had finally, clumsily, reached his goal. And later there had been the flushed, happy look on her face as she had rested, eyes closed and wisps of hay in her braided black hair …

  Walking down the road, Eddie shook his head as he realized he had relived the scene so vividly that sweat was trickling down his back. So much had happened since that rainy afternoon. They had seen as much of each other as they could, and they were lucky indeed not to have gotten into trouble in their ignorance. Later, after Eddie’s father had died of a heart attack and Eddie was working on farms outside Twenty Mile River, they had continued to see each other, but by then he had learned from other young men that he must take precautions.

  Their affair had ended one night when Eddie had devoted too much attention to another girl at a Grange Hall dance, and they had quarreled and split up. Joan had met Paul Kelder, a rather dashing salesman in his thirties, and the two had married only a few months afterward.

  The marriage had been a fiasco from the start. Paul was a heavy drinker and a flagrant skirt-chaser, indifferent alike to the age and marital status of his quarry. He had carried his free-booting style of philandering too far when he had taken a naive but maturely built high-school girl named Mamie Hall up into Tremper Park and had held her prisoner there the night long. The result had been a baby before she was sixteen for Mamie, and a richly deserved prison sentence for Kelder.

  Eddie shook his head again, and took a deep breath of the scent of the pines along the road, finally banishing the memories. He had to think about making a good impression on Frank Jennings. It wasn’t exactly what Eddie wanted to do, this hunting and trapping v
ermin on the estate, but he had to have a steady job, and at least he was well qualified to handle it. When he was younger, living on the farm and going to school, he had done a lot of hunting and trapping during the open season, and the money from the sale of the furs had paid for most of his clothes. As he looked back at it now, he could understand that he hadn’t really enjoyed it. Like many big and powerful men he could be brutal at times, but killing animals always bothered him. It was said that an animal in a trap didn’t suffer after its leg became numb, but he didn’t believe it — he had seen too often how desperately the helpless wild things fought the traps.

  The woods thinned out. Here, on either side of the road, were fields which rolled gently down a slope and came to an abrupt halt at a green lawn, large enough for growing a small herd of cattle. Past the lawn was the house, great twenty-room manor, made of native stone and trimmed with green, and beyond it a lake that glistened silver in the sun.

  As he approached the house, Eddie saw a wheel chair with a gray-haired man in it moving out onto the lawn, reflected sunlight blazing from its chromed parts. The rider was wheeling himself with short, savage strokes that indicated arm and shoulder muscles developed beyond the ordinary.

  “Good morning,” Eddie said as he came up to the chair. “You must be Mr. Jennings.”

  The man nodded and reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

  “I’m Frank Jennings,” he said after he had lit the cigarette, inhaling the smoke and letting it out with a rush of air. “Joan told you I was a cripple, didn’t she?”

  “She said you’d had an accident of some sort.”

  “Two years ago a horse threw me during my honeymoon. Great timing, wasn’t it? All the money I had couldn’t put me back together again. I’ve been in this damned chair ever since I got out of the hospital. I bought the horse and had it shot the next day,” he added. “Got rid of the bastard before he made it his business to kill somebody.”

  Eddie didn’t say anything. It seemed senseless to have a horse killed because of an unfortunate mishap. Apparently a man who had money could buy death at the snap of his fingers, at least for animals.

  “You know what the job is?” Jennings asked him.

  “A little.”

  “I have two thousand acres and it would be your duty to hunt and trap every foot of it.”

  “That’s a lot of land.”

  “And there are two lakes. Moon Lake, which you can see from here, and Goose Lake, which is about half a mile away. There are streams too, but most of them are dried up this time of year.”

  Eddie wanted to sit down on the grass and rest, but he remained standing.

  “You had somebody before this,” Eddie said.

  “Yes. Man named Jim. He did fairly well with the trapping, but he got fresh with my wife and daughter and I couldn’t put up with that.”

  “No man could,” Eddie agreed.

  “I happened to mention to Joan that I was looking for somebody to fill his place,” Jennings said, puffing on his cigarette. “She said that you were experienced. Are you?”

  “I think I could hold my end down.”

  “What can you catch?”

  “Almost anything.”

  “Foxes?”

  “Sure.”

  “And otter?”

  “They’re protected this time of year.”

  Jennings made an unpleasant face and threw the cigarette away. “I don’t care what the law says,” he snapped somewhat annoyed. “I pay taxes on this property. Otters eat their weight in fish every twenty-four hours. I spend a lot of money stocking both lakes with bass and trout every year, and I’m not going to have it slide down the drain. If you work for me you trap everything from otter to raccoon. If you get arrested I’ll pay the fine. But you won’t. The game warden never comes out here.”

  Eddie shifted his weight. There was something about Jennings he didn’t like, a streak of meanness that wasn’t normal. It looked as though his fall from the horse had made him hate every animal that walked and he had the money to pursue his grudge.

  “How much does it pay?” Eddie asked.

  “Three hundred a month and your room and board. You eat in the kitchen of the main house, but you have your own room over the garage. Hours are eight to five, with one day off a week. If you want to go into town, ask either Mrs. Jennings or myself for the station wagon. If it’s available you can use it.”

  Eddie thought it over. He still didn’t like the idea of killing animals for a living, but three hundred a month clear would be a godsend. Certainly it was more than he could earn on a farm.

  “When could I start?” Eddie inquired.

  “Right away. Today if you want.”

  “All right.”

  “I imagine you have some clothes and gear to pick up in town?”

  “I can’t get it,” Eddie said.

  “Can’t get it?”

  “No. I’m back a month on my room rent — thirty dollars — and the landlady has my clothes locked up until I can pay her.”

  “She’d have to find a hell of a big man who could fit into them.”

  “Big enough.”

  “I don’t like to advance money,” Jennings said thoughtfully. “How do I know you won’t take it and vanish?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. I need the job. Besides, Joan and I have been friends since we were kids. I’d never let her down like that.”

  “Mrs. Jennings has to go in for groceries this morning. You can ride with her.”

  “That would be fine.”

  Jennings reached into his rear pocket, removed his wallet and counted out four tens.

  “Here,” he said handing the bills to Eddie. “Thirty for your room rent and another ten until payday. You get paid every two weeks.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Jennings leaned back in the wheel chair.

  “Just do a good job and you can stay as long as you want. I pay a little more than I have to, but I expect results.”

  “What happens to the furs in the winter when they’re prime?”

  “You can sell them. Consider it sort of a bonus.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “And you report to me once a day.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s a shed behind the garage. You’ll find the traps in there — I think there are about two hundred — If you need more, or bait for your sets, you can buy the stuff in town and I’ll pay for it. Jim used to use canned salmon for raccoons and skunks and he had good luck.”

  “It works,” Eddie agreed. “Salmon has a good strong odor. I prefer smoked herring, though. I think the odor lasts a little longer than salmon.”

  They shook hands, and Jennings told him to go around to the kitchen and get a cup of coffee while he was waiting for Mrs. Jennings. Eddie thanked him again for the advance and promised to do a good job.

  The kitchen was large enough for a busy restaurant. A gray-haired woman at one of the sinks turned to stare at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m the new trapper, Eddie Boyd.”

  “I’m Mary. The cook. Have some coffee?”

  “Thanks, I could use a cup.”

  He picked a cup up from the table and poured it full of steaming coffee from an electric percolator.

  “You’ll find cream in the refrigerator,” Mary said. “And sugar on the table.”

  He sat down at the table and Mary returned to her work at the sink.

  “Breakfast is at seven for the help,” she said. “Lunch at twelve and supper at five. You’re either on time or you don’t get it. The family eats later.”

  “I’ll remember the hours.”

  “If you want to carry your lunch I’ll pack one for you.”

  “Probably that would be best.”

  The coffee was delicious, not too strong and not too weak, with the nutlike flavor of fresh-ground coffee. He had just about finished it when Joan came in through a swinging door, the pink uniform whi
ch she wore failing to conceal the sweetly curved lines of her body.

  “I just heard,” she said, stopping beside him. “I think it’s great, simply great.”

  He looked up at her and grinned. She was small and dark, and she had full red lips that could burn against his mouth and drive him almost out of his mind.

  “It worked out pretty good,” he admitted.

  “Mrs. Jennings said to tell you to wait in the car. The Bentley. It’s out in front of the house.”

  He got to his feet, towering over her. They had a private joke about how he could eat off her head when they were standing, but they seemed just the right size for each other lying down.

  “I’ll walk outside with you,” she said.

  He held the door for her, then followed her across the porch and down the steps. It was hotter now, really blazing, and the lake looked inviting. He could see a strip of sandy beach and a big umbrella over a table.

  “I can’t go far,” she said, stopping, reaching for his arm and making him stop beside her. “Today I have to clean the upstairs and there’s a lot to be done.” She kicked at a little stone on the cement walk, missed, and kicked again. “I’ll clean up your room and make your bed,” she said. “When I get through for the night, usually about nine, I’ll sneak up to see you. Wait for me, Eddie.”

  “Hell, you think we should?”

  “Why not? They won’t know. Mr. Jennings has blasted his brains out with booze by that time, and she wouldn’t care even if she knew.” She laughed and squeezed his arm. “It ought to be just right for us out here, Eddie. We’ll both be working and when we’re off our time will be our own.”

  “Sounds fair enough.”

  She turned, leaving him, and he continued on around the house. What, he asked himself, was he supposed to do? Tell her that he didn’t want to see her? A guy lived once and he took what he could get.

  The Bentley, its windows down, was parked under the porte-cochère, in front of a fairly new Plymouth station wagon. As he got in he could almost smell the money the car had cost, and he sighed as he relaxed on the deep cushion. Why did some people have so much and others so little?