Chapter 06
Ethan Chase had lied to his mother. He'd said he was not sentimental about the tools and machinery he surrounded himself with. But there was a single exception, her convertible. She'd owned the Miata for as long as he could remember. It was a graceful, sexy little thing that grew more beautiful as the years passed. He loved its lines and the throaty note of its engine.
It reminded him of Lauren herself. But he would never tell her that. Certainly not in those terms.
And it needed his help.
Replacing the crankshaft meant pulling the engine. When he got the block clear, he noticed the black box. It sat against the inner fender just in front of the firewall, where no such thing belonged.
He didn't touch the box. He walked around the front of the car several times, studying it from different angles. He got down on the crawler with a light. He could reach it, but only because there was nothing in his way.
Whoever had placed it there would have had to move the engine, which meant a hoist and tools.
He surveyed the vehicles and parts in his hangar. What else was assembled and running? He'd just pulled the carb limiter off of the Dnepr that he'd had shipped over from Yugoslavia. This afternoon would be the time to find out if the thing could merge onto the interstate without killing him.
He kick-started the bike and set off to visit Lew Bradley. He had questions for the attorney, and they had nothing at all to do with corporate law.
The Bradleys lived in the foothills, in a new Spanish Colonial on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood with long green lawns that were a couple of missed waterings away from turning back to dust. A slender young woman opened the front door as Ethan parked on the curved flagstone driveway.
"Hey, Ethan." Peyton Bradley waved at the old motorcycle and sidecar. "That is so cool. And loud."
"Hi, Peyton. Your dad home?"
"Uh-uh. Don't know where he's gone. Come on, get out of the heat. It's like, what, a hundred and three? Can I get you something?"
"Glass of water, maybe."
"Sparkling?"
"Tap is good. Thanks."
Peyton was a pretty girl whose emotional affect was situated at the junction of cheerful and vacant. Ethan was more attracted to older women. Women who'd lived lives that showed in their eyes and the way they carried themselves. They liked him too. During his abbreviated college career, he'd had affairs with a forty-something psychology professor, an ancient history lecturer, and two comp sci instructors. Ms. Maddy Jones, his psych professor, had taken the direct approach: one day after class she'd locked the lecture hall door, dropped to her knees, and practically gnawed through the front of his jeans.
The history teacher had stuck with the classics and simply offered him a better grade for sex. He hadn't needed the academic help, but he'd enjoyed the extra tutoring.
So Ethan accepted, based on experience, that he had his share of natural gifts. But human beings confused the hell out of him. As fortune had permitted, he'd taken refuge in the world of algorithms, machines, and rational data.
"Irina might know where Dad is," Peyton grabbed a plastic cup from the dishwasher. "She's sunbathing out back."
"Was." Irina stood in the doorway, tall and tan and wearing only a white thong. Her brown shoulders, the soft peaks of her nipples, and her flat tummy glistened with oil. "I should thank you for making all that racket in the driveway. I'd have napped myself right into the burn ward. Foolish of me."
"You want ice?" Ethan caught the edge in Payton's voice. Losing a guy's attention to her exhibitionist stepmother apparently irritated her. She handed him the drink and left the kitchen.
"Lew went down to the office for some papers he's got to review over the weekend. He should be back in an hour or two. You can call him down there, I'm sure." Standing less than a foot from Ethan, she was tall enough that she barely needed to lift her chin to meet his eyes. "Unless there's something I can help with?"
"Well, I'm not sure. I just wanted to ask him why he'd pay a mechanic to put a GPS tracker on my mom's car."
Irina raised an eyebrow. "You're right. You'd have to ask him that yourself."
"Irina, that's not the way to play it. You're supposed to say it like this: 'What? I don't understand, why would he do that? I don't know what you're talking about.' Something like that. But make it your own."
She bit her lip. "I don't really think--"
"So, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you had your husband bug my mom's car because the Novaks told you to."
"Lew's warned me that you're a clever one."
"It's my profession to find patterns in random data. This one's obvious once you know to look for it. Isn't the most attractive thing about Lew his proximity to our money?"
"Easily," Irina agreed. "Ethan, we don't mean anyone harm. Everything we're doing will benefit you in ways you can't yet imagine." She leaned in close, smelling of coconut and orange blossoms. "Let me--let us--show you."
Her breath was a furnace. The sunlight through the window behind her haloed her fine dark hair, growing inexplicably brighter, eating into the shape of her head and burning away all detail and shadow until she completely dissolved into the flare. Ethan tried to shield his eyes from the fire, but moving was like walking on the ocean floor. Irina kept talking but the words were of no language that he knew. A roar like a jet engine rose inside his head, drowning her out.
Peyton's chipmunk soprano cut through the noise, echoing from the far side of the cosmos.
"Don't let him hurt himself!"
He pivoted drunkenly and grabbed with both hands at the melting granite edge of the kitchen island. It shrank from him like a frightened octopus and crumbled to sand, floating away. His hands came loose from his arms, chasing it until everything disappeared into the smothering dark.
Little by little, the watery pale light of a winter moon resolved into a frosted glass lamp in the center of an overhead fan. Ethan lay counting its turning wooden blades. Four. No, five.
To his left was a window looking out at the mountains. Long evening shadows filled the pockets and valleys of the range. He could raise and turn his head freely, but his wrists and ankles were bound by soft leather cuffs fitted with bolt snaps, which in turn were fastened to steel rings attached to wide straps made of heavy webbing. The webbing was looped and buckled around the mattress on which he lay. He was naked. It didn't bother him, as he was fairly sure the thousand-mile-long body strapped to the bed belonged to someone else. The erection jutting up from between his legs could not be his. He was big enough, but this thing was a stony, priapic monument. And anyway, it made no sense for him to be aroused.
"Wuh..." he shook his head hard to clear it. That was a mistake.
"Give yourself a moment, dear. There's no hurry." Irina's voice. She and Peyton stood by the bed looking down at him. They were naked as well. Okay, the hard-on made some sense, after all.
"I did good, huh, Mom?" Peyton leaned against her stepmother and offered her lips for a kiss. Irina's mouth closed on hers, elegant fingers caressed the arches of the young blonde's pelvis.
"Offhand, I...can...think...of five hibib...uh, hypnotic drugs that are tasteless in water." The stumbling, alien croak of Ethan's own voice startled him. He stared at his stubbornly erect dick again. "I'm betting that Libidramine isn't like that, though."
"Water? Oh, that was the benzos," Irina said. "You won't remember, but by the time we offered you Lib, you were more than willing. Enthusiastic, I'd say. You even helped us get you up here and into our playset. Thank God. I wasn't sure that the two of us together could carry you if you completely passed out."
Ethan nodded weakly. "I guess I just flunked Private Eye 101."
"When you saw Irina, I could've handed you a glass of sriracha and you'd have drunk it," Peyton teased.
Ethan hoped that keeping up aimless chatter would persuade Irina he was still fuzzy-headed. He hoped that he wasn't still more doped up than he thought he was.
Taking stock of his predicament, it was easy to see that neither woman was armed. The bondage rig he found himself in was as Irina had described it--no more sturdy than a playset. It shouldn't take more than two good strong yanks to tear something loose and to break free.
"You guys can yak if you want. I'm gonna play with his cock." Peyton climbed onto the bed. Her dark blue eyes were alight and her lips moistly parted as her finger circled the rim of Ethan's glans.
"Ah-ungh!" Overwhelming pleasure shot through Ethan's brain like a thunderbolt. His drugged sense of detachment from his body shattered and all thought of escape vanished in an instant; he had never been more physically present in his life.
Peyton giggled and clapped her hands.
"I'm afraid that you may have taken rather a lot of pills. There really was no stopping you." Irina smirked. "I called Lew and asked him not to hurry home. I promise you, he'll do whatever I request. You're about to find out exactly why. Lucky you."
Peyton kissed Ethan's cock. He screamed and convulsed against his restraints. The intensity of the stimulation was shocking.
"Oh, he likes that! He gets harder than Daddy. And he's a lot bigger."
"He's young. He has superior stamina, and he's in excellent physical condition," Irina explained. "I'm sure you'll find him a more satisfying fuck even than your beloved father." She approached her stepdaughter from behind and reached between the girl's legs. Peyton's eyes widened and she squealed. "Go on and suck him off now, little frog."
Peyton's mouth gaped open as automatically as if Irina had flipped a switch inside her. She lowered her head to swallow as much of Ethan's cock as she could. Her tongue swirled around his knob and she bobbed up and down, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat while her lips squeezed and milked his shaft.
He bucked spastically up off the mattress, gritting his teeth against crying out again.
Irina lay next to him and stroked his chest. She bit his ear playfully. "Peyton was so wonderfully naïve when we first met. So impressionable. Exploring her sexuality while under the amplifying influence of Lib has encouraged her spontaneity. She's extremely open to direction--especially when accompanied by the right kind of physical attention. She's my little slut, now." Irina tweaked his nipple, sending an exquisite tremor that reached to his balls. "She can be yours, too."
Teetering at the edge of sanity, Ethan tried to focus on something, anything other than the ecstatic bombardment of his senses. He struggled to recall Maddy Jones's class lectures on behavioral conditioning. Stimulus-response. Neurology...dopamine...the McGill studies.
Ages ago, researchers at McGill University had used electrodes to stimulate the pleasure centers of rats' brains, rewarding them for learning and repeating desired tasks. It had worked so well that, eventually, other doctors had tried to modify human behavior the same way--specifically, human sexual behavior. The ethical objections to that had been strenuous and, as far as anyone knew, succeeded at putting an end to the experiments.
Yet, the reward of orgasmic pleasure had proved to be far better at changing behavior than was punishment and deprivation. Give people a taste of something that made them feel good enough and they would do anything to get more of it. And if researchers gave control of the pleasure source to the experimental subjects, they'd give up everything else to indulge.
It was the very definition of addiction. In the case of the McGill rats, some had died of starvation chasing their electric bliss.
Peyton Bradley held Ethan's cock in both hands, eagerly sliding it in and out of her drooling mouth. She loved nothing better in the world than this. The rush of a man's blood to the engorged knob of his prick, making it grow larger still, stretching her lips tight around its girth, was sheer animal magic. She loved the wet tickling of her pussy cream leaking out past her cunt lips. Most of all, she loved the taste of cum; she never got enough of semen flooding her throat and filling up her mouth. God, how she longed to taste it again! She sucked greedily on Ethan's prick. He thrashed so hard against his bonds that she was afraid he'd throw her off, and she dug her fingers into the sinewy flesh of his thighs to steady herself as much as possible.
All the while, Irina's nimble fingers moved over Peyton's vulva and clitoris, silently coaxing her to let go and lose herself completely in the sensual thrill of sucking cock. Peyton so adored Irina that it seemed strange now to remember how crushed she'd been when the exotic, sensual woman had first entered her father's life. Dismay had turned quickly to devotion when Irina had introduced her to Libidramine, taken her to bed, and passed a long night fondling and fingering and licking her to mind-blowing climax after climax.
And then, her new stepmother had taught her how to fuck her father.
Irina was Peyton's north star, her teacher and her lover and her joy. Most importantly of all, Irina was her source of Lib.
"Ye- ow!" Ethan shook violently and jerked his ass upward, slamming his cock all the way down Peyton's throat. This was it--she pumped his prick madly as volley after volley of cum shot into her mouth. She clamped her lips tightly around the wide base of his cock, gulping and swallowing, desperate to milk every drop from him, to drain him completely. When his ejaculation slowed to a dribble she kept jacking him off, pulling her lips from his cock to kiss up and down the hard, saliva-soaked rod.
"Stay hard. Pleasepleaseplease. I need to fuck now. I need a cock in my pussy so bad."
"Don't worry about that, dear." Irina's throaty chuckle recalled Ethan from the edge of unconsciousness. He'd come so hard that he'd nearly blacked out, and his mind was as clouded as when he'd first awoken from his drugged slumber. She cradled his balls in her hand, and his sack tightened and swelled again as she rolled his testicles between her fingers. "See, what did I tell you? This stud is good for a few more rounds before we'll have to let him rest. And he'll recover quickly." She sat up and brushed a few strands of pale, sweat-matted hair out of Peyton's eyes, kissing her on the bridge of her nose. Peyton's eyes sparkled as Ethan's cock reared up, as hard as if he hadn't gotten his rocks off in days.
"Lick his balls," Irina commanded, and Peyton dropped her head to obey. "I want to suck his cock for a while." Irina sighed and said to Ethan, "I am so starved of good fuck-meat these days. As you might imagine."
"So then, the bloom is off the rose with old Lew?" Ethan adopted the most offhanded and mocking tone that he could manage. Forming words was hard, but the first shock of this new kind of drug experience was receding. He wanted to keep Irina talking. He assumed that she must use Lib herself, and Lew apparently functioned, more or less, under its influence as well. So Ethan hoped that he could habituate to it and find a way out of this captivity on his terms.
Irina sniffed. "Lew's a utility. He's a means to an end."
"What do you think of that, Peyton? You like the way New Mom talks about your Daddy?" Ethan couldn't tell if the girl even heard him, so intent was she on her ball-sucking.
"You needn't bother. She's outgrowing her Daddy crush. It's not so healthy for a young lady with Peyton's potential to get hung up on an older man who can never truly satisfy her needs. Surely you must agree that Lew is rather poor clay." Irina swiped her tongue-tip across Ethan's cock knob. The effect was intense but not as overpowering as when he had not known what to expect. "You, now you're the future. You're young and highly intelligent. And strong."
"And a partner in the firm you're trying to take over," Ethan prodded. "That's the most important part, and you left it out."
Irina paused in her cock-sucking and regarded him thoughtfully. "It's not so sinister as all that. I'll grant you that some of our ways of engaging with our negotiating partners have been unorthodox."
"Like spying on my mother? "
"Yes, well...In the end, all of you will profit handsomely from our merger. And I hope this afternoon to demonstrate the very personal benefits that will come to you, Ethan, by choosing to side with us."
"You might not believe this, Irina, but I've had better offers than 'drug-addicted sex slave.' Strange but true."
Irina laughed. "You're so cute. Oh, I'd love to just keep you here forever. However..." She swallowed his cock and twisted her head from side to side, corkscrewing her lips around him. Lights flashed behind his eyes and he nearly passed out again.
"Fuck now," Peyton murmured with a vacuous smile. She mounted him and slowly lowered herself onto his cock. The tip grazed her pussy and her sex lips spread wide to take him inside. His swollen glans entered her warm, creamy opening and he felt her shudder, the inner sleeve of her cunt flexing around his penetrating shaft.
"So much bigger," she sighed, halting her descent with less than half of his rod buried in her cunt. She wiggled up and down slightly, easing her way a little further down each time. "I gotta get it in me...Oh yeah...that's it, that's the way..." Her determination unnerved Ethan. Her small slit was so tight and she was so intent on her mission that he didn't think he was being too egotistical in worrying that she might injure herself. She must be stretched to the limit.
He needn't have been concerned. Peyton paused only briefly to catch her breath and get used to the massive intruder. Then she rode him, rising and falling, faster and faster, twisting and gyrating insanely.
His heart hammered in his chest like he was running a six-minute mile. Despite having come only minutes before, he was sure that he was seconds away from a second ejaculation. But he didn't orgasm. He couldn't. He lay suspended at that instant just before release, trapped in an indescribable euphoria that just went on and on and on.
Irina straddled Ethan's knees behind Peyton, reaching around to take her stepdaughter's small breasts in her hands. She kneaded the tender white flesh, pinching the young woman's erect nipples. Peyton inhaled sharply and closed her eyes. She bit down on her lower lip and her head rolled to one side. Irina kissed up and down the curve of her stepdaughter's neck so possessively she looked as if she might sprout fangs and go for blood. "Come now, darling. Come on that great...big... cock!"
Peyton stiffened and quaked, climaxing on command. "Atta girl. Come for Mommy." Irina winked at Ethan. "Isn't she a splendid fuck? And she's only going to get better with more experience. More partners."
"You're programming her."
"You are the dramatic one, aren't you? Peyton loves to fuck. Don't you, Peyton?"
"Love to fuck," Peyton repeated dreamily.
"See how happy she is? I'd say such single-minded dedication to pleasure is its own reward, but think about this, Ethan: how much will people pay for happiness? Or at least for total sexual satisfaction?"
Ethan couldn't answer. Everything was being stripped inexorably from his mind but primal rutting instinct, the last shreds of rational thought spinning away in a hurricane of drug-fueled lust.
"Milk him," Irina instructed her stepdaughter. Peyton's pussy contracted around his cock.
"God...gonna...you're killin' me...ungh... /i> mother...fuck..."
"Oh, now there's a thought." Irina moved forward to straddle his face. "Would you like that, Ethan?"
"What?"
"Your mother. You and Lauren. We can make that happen." Irina swung a leg over his head and lowered her pussy onto his face. Crazy with need, he pressed his mouth to her vagina and sucked hungrily, spearing his tongue up into her warm, slick slot. She squirmed contentedly. "Play along, and you can have anything you like. So why not dear old Mom?"
The soft tissues of her mound muffled Ethan's howls as he drove his cock up into Peyton and climaxed again.
Lauren and Stefan were crowded into one of the Land Rovers with Janet, a young man she introduced as Jakob, and two others for the long drive across the rugged cliff sides of Kai'ulau back to the Novaks' headquarters. Long stretches of the road were unpaved, and beyond the throw of the headlights was pitch darkness. Their driver took the fogbound curves like he was cruising the Autobahn.
The journey itself was harrowing, but the little that Lauren was able to learn from Janet along the way unnerved her far more. Jan seemed untroubled by her husband's disappearance and too vague on the details. Lauren suspected that she didn't want to talk freely in front of the others. The two women agreed to meet privately the next day.
Exhausted as she was, Lauren still slept badly. She woke breathless several times from weird dreams, sweating and wetly aroused. After dozing late into the morning, she wandered down a winding staircase to the great hall of the place that Jan had called the Hermitage and promptly got lost. The building was an odd combination of old and new, ancient stonework branching abruptly into corridor extensions of manufactured block and concrete and fluorescent lighting. She backtracked a couple of times, trying to remember Jan's directions of the previous night. Eventually, she found her way outside to an open courtyard.
A broad, curving flight of stone steps led down onto gardens bounded by a low crumbling wall. Jan lay sunbathing on one of two mattresses beside a sculptured fountain at the far end, naked save for big sunglasses. She sat up and waved at Lauren.
"There you are! Jet-lagged much?"
"My body has no idea what year it is." Lauren sat in a half-lotus on the second mattress, clad in her rinsed-and-wrung tee-shirt and a brief sarong skirt she'd found in a drawer of the rattan chest in her sleeping quarters. "Is there somewhere in the town where I can buy some things?"
"You mean like a cute little boutique kind of place? Nah. There's no tourist economy here. We're too far from everything. You know you're welcome to what's in my closet. Looks like we're still pretty much the same size. Someone should get some use out of all that stuff."
"Thanks. Uh, you wearing clothes at all, these days?"
Jan picked up a tumbler of amber liquid from the flagstone and sipped from it. "Not when I can help it. The climate is ideal for nudity. And clothes are a nuisance when I want a cock in me."
"Jesus Christ, Jan!"
Janet laughed, long and loud. "Your face!"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Lauren had a sleepy memory of Jan pawing Jakob like a horny teenager the previous night, just short of sitting in his lap for most of the drive. He'd returned her attentions casually, intent on his conversation with Stefan in a language Lauren didn't know.
"Wrong? Not a thing, hon," Janet said, seeming untroubled by Lauren's tone. She waved and raised her glass as if in a toast. "Welcome to Shangri-La. Hungry?"
"I don't eat in the morning."
"Morning's fled. Have some of this stuff. Tangerines and mangos and booze and I don't know what all else. It hits you on an empty stomach, maybe you'll unclench a little."
Lauren stared in disbelief. "I don't know you."
"Yes you do, Zonk. It's just been such a very long time." She reached over and brushed the backs of her fingers across Lauren's cheek. "Hasn't it?"
The unexpected use of the old nickname set Lauren back on her heels. Her pulse quickened and her stomach fluttered at Jan's touch-- at long-buried memories and feelings that she didn't appreciate her friend rekindling.
Perfect SATs had compensated for Lauren's mediocre high school GPA to get her into DeSoto State, where she'd flailed hopelessly away at freshman remedial algebra. A volunteer tutoring program had paired her with a severe, earnest sophomore named Janet Tucker, who appeared to exist in the world without family, friends, or any sense of humor whatever.
After two review sessions, Jan had looked at her pupil through her thick eyeglasses and announced, "Zonk, you're wasting your time and mine unless you're going to buckle down. Study more and party less. Like, a lot less."
The name meant nothing to Lauren. Her mother overheard the exchange and was tickled to explain it at dinner that evening. Turned out that the tutor did have a sense of humor, one that Lauren didn't much care for.
"You think I'm a dumb stoner."
"Zonker is not dumb," Jan objected, retreating to her most professorial manner. "He's the best character in the strip. He's a free spirit. Like you."
They'd stared at one another for a long time after that. Lauren didn't remember which of them had blushed and looked away first.
That was how they'd begun.
"This is not the time." Lauren's voice quavered. She moved away from Jan. "We have to talk about Frank. What happened?"
"Frank," Janet repeated with a puzzled frown. "I told you last night, Frank left."
"Yeah, so you said. He just walked out the door in the middle of the night without a word. You didn't talk to him. No one saw him."
"We weren't together. We were fighting. He was being crazy. Paranoid, like he was convinced we were in danger here. And he was mad because...Okay, you know I'm fucking Jakob?"
"Um, I kinda picked up on that, yeah."
"And Dominic, and...oh, a lot of guys. I'm fucking lots of guys now, all right? Frank couldn't stand to see that."
"How unreasonable of him." The significance of Janet's phrasing sank in. "Wait--you literally were having sex with other men in front of him?"
Appallingly, Janet giggled. "I was a faithful wife for twenty years, Lauren. Not that many good years, but what the hell. And then we came here, and, well, Lib just changes everything."
"You've completely lost your mind."
"Uh-huh. Didn't you say last night that you've used Libidramine yourself?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Did you take it with Jon?"
Lauren opened her mouth but could not speak. As she and Stefan had fucked through the night, she'd sworn that she would not stop if the hotel were burning down around them.
"Well...shit."
"The Natural Products Expo in Miami. Two years ago?" Janet reminded. "We roomed together. And I spent most of the weekend alone. How many times did you ball that sales rep from Utah? So don't judge, okay?"
"Jesus." Lauren took a deep breath and decided to try again. "Frank is missing. Left humiliated, got lost, got taken, whatever. Where is he?"
"I don't know."
"It's an island. There's one real town. How often are there even ships in the harbor? What's happened to your husband, Jan?"
"Nothing! He's not--Aleksandra says she has people looking for him. Frank's all right. They'll find him."
Pressing the point was futile. Jan had checked out, disassociating on a deep level, blocking those possibilities that were too terrible to bear...at least for now. Stockholm syndrome? Constant drinking? The Libidramine? Could those even be considered apart from each other? A chill ran through Lauren, mindful of the desperate imperative of the addict: protect access to the supply, whatever the cost.
The full weight of her own peril bore in on her for the first time. She'd rushed in, as usual, chasing something without forethought. And here she was on an island so distant and obscure that it wasn't on Wikipedia, completely dependent on her hosts for safe passage home. Lost among strangers. If she couldn't even reach Jan, she was utterly alone.
She had to be careful. Don't force Jan to confront what she couldn't. Ask safe questions that she might want to answer.
"Pour me a glass of that stuff," Lauren said with careful nonchalance, reclining on her mattress. "What've you learned so far, about Libidramine?"
"Hmm. That's the big one." Janet's eyes brightened. She pursed her lips as if her pupil had asked her to explain polynomials. Lauren smiled despite herself. "Okay, so it's derived from the blossom of a plant called Tiare Aeaea. So named by Père Thomas, a French Catholic priest who was a botanist and zoologist. Those were his hobbies. His day job was saving the wretched souls of the hedonistic savages."
"God's work. Seems to have been a bust."
"Uh-huh. For reasons." Janet gestured toward the monastery. "There's a trove of old documents in there. Copies of charts and logbooks that belonged to the French sailors, journals kept by the colonists, genealogies and weather logs kept by the monks...all kinds of cool stuff. Aleksandra's turned me loose in the Hermitage library. She's as curious about Kai'ulauan history as I am, and my French is way better than hers.
"There are later writings in English, too. Like, you ever hear of the Nancy B. Flanagan? It was a whaling schooner that disappeared out here in the mid-1800s. Turns out they shipwrecked on Kai'ulau. Twenty-three crew, all of them black freedmen. Modern islanders are quite a mix, Polynesian and European and African."
"Yeah, that's real interesting. But about the flowers..."
"From Father Tom's notes and what I can look up online, when the Internet even works here, I'd guess the plant is an unknown variety of Sclerotheca. There are less than a dozen cataloged species. And Aeaea only grows on Kai'ulau."
"That's remarkable. And very convenient for the Novaks."
"But not as odd as you might think. It has a cousin, Apetahi, that only grows on the slopes of one extinct volcano on Raiatea. No one knows why. I bet if there was a fuck-load of money to be made from it, someone would figure out how to transplant it pretty quick. So you see why the family's keeping this close. Why they want so badly to control distribution."
"Keep the secret. Stretch out the window of exclusivity as long as possible. Can't say I exactly blame them. But look, how does the drug work? What's it doing to us?"
"Hon, I've got no idea." Janet laughed. "I'm just a schoolgirl scientist. And they've got no research labs here. But you know that as soon Lib gets out onto the market all the pharma giants will be all over it looking for something they can synthesize and patent. Every government--"
"Will want to control it. Don't you think this is dangerous, Jan? It's--"
"It'll be disruptive as hell," Janet agreed. "I haven't told you the half of it. Now, as nearly as I can tell, Lib just supercharges every system of the body. You become more of whatever you already are. It heightens your senses--makes every experience way more intense. Increases your metabolic efficiency, stamina, pain tolerance. And obviously, it jacks your sex drive into the stratosphere. I stay hornier than a submarine crew on a weekend pass in Bangkok." Jan cocked her head and winked at Lauren mischievously. "And how are you feeling?"
"Goddamn, cut it out."
"I'm totally serious. Listen to your body, Laur. Motor running a little hot?"
"Jan, I really don't want to--"
"You realize that you're breathing Lib right now?"
"What!"
"Pollen from the blossoms is carried on the wind, everywhere on the island. It's been part of Kai'ulauan culture for a thousand years. They use the plant in traditional medicine. They cook with it. They bury their dead with garlands of it, which, if you ask me, really is missing the point.
"It affects everyone all the time. After a few days here, Frank and I were both so hot and bothered that, well, by the time Jakob gave us the refined drug I was primed and about to explode."
She brought her face close to Lauren's. "And the same thing's happening to you. How'd you sleep last night?"
Jan pulled Lauren close and kissed her, tongue darting at the corners of Lauren's mouth.
"Don't start this again, Jan. Please. Not...not now." Both knew too well that her reluctance was not refusal. Jan angled a leg over both of Lauren's and slid a hand under her friend's sarong to cup her buttocks.
Lauren's heart pounded, and she twisted as if to pull away. But physical impulse won out over willpower, and she ground her vulva against Janet's thigh. Pushing Lauren's shirt up off of her breasts, Jan lowered her face and sucked one large flat areola into her mouth. She bit the hardening nipple lightly and lashed it with her tongue.
"Now is a perfect time." Jan moved to the other breast and continued sucking. Lauren trembled from head to toe. It as was if no time at all had passed, and they were nineteen and twenty and together in the little attic bedroom of her mother's row house on Munsee Island. "Come on, lady, I want you naked."
A flash hotter than the tropic sun shot through Lauren at Jan's words. She hesitated for half a heartbeat before tugging the knotted cotton at her waist loose and pulling her sarong free. She let Janet pull her shirt off. They were naked together. She ran her hand through Janet's short hair, fingers caressing the nape of her neck, holding her close. So much had changed, and so little; Janet was still the one leading them down the path that they both wanted so desperately to tread.
The young teacher had not quite seduced her student, the first time. Janet was too reticent for that, and Lauren was more sexually experienced than she. But Lauren had only been with guys. Once she'd made the first move Janet had taken over. Jan was a voracious reader, and it turned out that her interests had ranged well beyond studious immersion in Mendel, Kant, and Al-Khwarizmi. Her favorite British author was not Bronte or Keats, but a prolific Victorian who'd signed their work "Anon." She had a riotous imagination and ideas of her own that she was dying to try with someone. She could be aggressive, dominating, and tender at the same time.
"I don't know what it is about you," she'd confided. "I've never been close to anyone. Never had a good friend that I can think of, really. All those foster homes...I guess I just don't attach."
Enthralled, Lauren had attached to Janet with a vengeance. They'd done everything together. Whether in or out of bed, Janet somehow always led. She'd talked their way into jobs on Jon and Frank's food truck. When Lauren had surprised herself by falling for Jon, rather than being jealous Jan had maneuvered it so that they became a foursome.
What had come next still stung. Remembering, Lauren pushed Janet away. "You ended us."
"I gave you up." Janet looked stricken. "When I married Frank...he wasn't who I thought he was. He changed."
"Don't hang it on someone else."
"I'm not blaming him. Okay, maybe that is what I did for a long time. That was wrong. I loved him, and he had fixed ideas of how things were supposed to be, in a marriage. I didn't want him to leave. We were all so laser-focused on getting along, on building this wretched business." Her vehement dismissal of Blue Oasis shocked Lauren. "You and Jon were crazy about each other, anyway. And I guess I just thought, you know, it was time for me to grow up."
She held Lauren and kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. "God, my heart has been in two pieces for so long. I'm so sorry."
Resentment and grief that Lauren had clung to for decades evaporated in the hot surge of her blood and the thrill of carnal reunion.
What Jan said about the Tiare must be true, then. There wasn't the extreme kick of rampant horniness that Lauren had experienced with Stefan--but then, Lib was a concentrated version of whatever was in the red flowers. The pollen's effect was more subtle but just as irresistible. And Jan's confession touched her.
Broken pieces.
"I feel like a piece of me is missing," Lauren had told Jon after Janet had ended their group relationship. "Like I've got a phantom limb that still aches." Jon had listened, without understanding. She had him, after all; why would she need anyone else? That was when what she'd lost had hit her hardest.
Lauren cradled Janet, covering her mouth in a long kiss. "You are insidious. You always have the words that make me want..."
"I've never made you do a thing, Zonk. I can't believe that anyone ever has."
Janet trailed her fingers down Lauren's stomach to her crotch, drawing lazy patterns on her velvet mound, not quite touching her moistening pussy yet. Lauren's labia swelled. Janet circled around her clitoris, fingers drawing closer and closer. "Yesss..." Lauren sighed. She squeezed her thighs together, trying to trap that teasing hand between them but Jan evaded her. Jan's eyes were dreamy and heavy-lidded. She smiled with satisfaction, coaxing Lauren's clit out of its hood. Her fingertip directly stroked the exposed, swollen pink button.
Lauren sucked in her breath. She squirmed and moaned and molded herself to Janet, mouth to mouth and tit to tit and belly to belly. Janet's nimble fingers brought her to the edge of climax just to let her slide away again. Once, twice...
Moaning, Lauren put her hand to the parting of Janet's legs, finding the blonde's soaking pussy.
"Oh yeah. Play with me, too," Jan murmured. "Right here, just now, there's only us." Her low, husky tone soothed and excited Lauren both at the same time. "No Jon. No Frank, no Ethan..."
"Ethan?" Lauren started.
Janet dipped a finger into Lauren's slit. "Wow, you're really gushing." She nibbled at Lauren's earlobe and whispered. "Because I mentioned Ethan? Oh, look at that! My girl has a secret! You know, on second thought I wouldn't mind having Ethan here right now. I don't think you would, either."
"Stop it!" Lauren protested. "Now you're just saying awful things. Like always."
"Only because it always gets you hot." Janet curled two fingers up inside Lauren's pussy, working them upward along her inner walls. "Why is it so awful, to want Ethan? "I'd sure want him if he were mine. There must be so many opportunities, for the two of you."
"Don't...talk like that..."
"Come on, you like it. You're not so alone. I think about Ethan a lot. He looks so much like you. Same eyes. Same mouth...I've sat through so many goddamn meetings at the office, watching him, all wet in my underpants. Now, isn't that awful, me wanting to fuck my best friend's great big stud of a son?"
Lauren cried out. Janet straddled her, peppering her throat and shoulders and breasts with little kisses. Her probing fingers massaged the sensitive nerve cluster deep inside Lauren's vagina that they both knew would drive her insane. "Didn't Stefan tell you, the Kai'ulauans don't care about such things? Incest is no big deal here. Another thing to love about this place. If Ethan were here now we could fuck him together. You and me. Imagine it...that's right...Has he got a big dick, hmm? Have you seen it? Of course you have! Your son's got a great big cock that belongs right here--"
Jan thrust three fingers in and out of Lauren's cunt in a fast fucking motion, as if they were a penis. Lauren shrieked and exploded in an orgasm so intense that the world grew dark around her. Her breath came in ragged gasps as she fought her way back from the brink of unconsciousness.
"You're more beautiful than ever," Jan mumbled. She kissed Lauren's breasts, fondling them and pleasuring her nipples with long slow licks and little nibbles. "So womanly. You're all new, again." She kissed her way down Lauren's belly and along one inner thigh as far as the knee before moving to the other and making her way with agonizing slowness back up to her warm, wet target. She blew softly on Lauren's clitoris. "Pretty pussy."
Lauren spread her legs wider apart, knees trembling. The wet tip of Jan's tongue edged up between her labia and she arched her hips automatically toward Jan's mouth. "Don't stop...please don't stop!"
"If I had my way I'd never stop. I'm gonna drink you dry," Janet opened her mouth wide, pressed her lips to Lauren's vulva, and sucked. Her tongue darted up into the hot little opening of Lauren's pussy, swiping and licking and swallowing every drop of nectar that she could find.
" Awh ...turn around! Turn around!" Lauren pushed at Janet's shoulders and clutched her short blond curls, urging her into a side-by-side sixty-nine. She parted Janet's pussy lips with two fingers and snuggled her face between Janet's legs, pushing her tongue as far into Janet's slit as she could.
Janet's pussy contracted around Lauren's tongue as she came twice in rapid succession. The taste of her and the thrill of having her this way once again triggered Lauren's own orgasm. She had never stopped yearning for the way that they had been together. How each had learned the other's body and appetites. How they could go on pleasing one another for hours. In their first months together Janet had come as close as she ever would to failing a course, too worn out from marathon nights of orgasmic joy to attend her morning classes.
It occurred to Lauren that, if Libidramine increased female sexual capacity to anything like the degree that it did Stefan's male stamina, she and Janet might well starve to death out here before they satisfied their mutual craving.
Breath by shared breath and heartbeat by heartbeat, Lauren's fear melted away. There was no danger here. This island and its strange fruit were not threats, but the answer to her unuttered prayers.
Or, maybe that was the drug talking.
The voice of doubt was never still.
The shadows of the palms lining the courtyard had grown long when Lauren awoke. Janet napped with her head tucked into the crook of her friend's arm. After a while, Lauren put a hand on Jan's hip and rocked her gently to rouse her.
"How long you been up?"
"A few minutes."
"Awake and thinking. I can see your wheels turn, you know. There are two little open windows in the front of your head."
"Is it true, what you said about this place, and, you know, family relationships?"
"Relationships? Do you mean sex?" The voice was not Janet's, but that of a small, dark woman who stood nearby watching them curiously. She was naked, voluptuous, and carried herself like an empress. "Yes, it is. And why not?"
The woman crouched beside the couple, extending her hand.
"Lauren Chase? Welcome to Kai'ulau. I'm Aleksandra Novak."
It reminded him of Lauren herself. But he would never tell her that. Certainly not in those terms.
And it needed his help.
Replacing the crankshaft meant pulling the engine. When he got the block clear, he noticed the black box. It sat against the inner fender just in front of the firewall, where no such thing belonged.
He didn't touch the box. He walked around the front of the car several times, studying it from different angles. He got down on the crawler with a light. He could reach it, but only because there was nothing in his way.
Whoever had placed it there would have had to move the engine, which meant a hoist and tools.
He surveyed the vehicles and parts in his hangar. What else was assembled and running? He'd just pulled the carb limiter off of the Dnepr that he'd had shipped over from Yugoslavia. This afternoon would be the time to find out if the thing could merge onto the interstate without killing him.
He kick-started the bike and set off to visit Lew Bradley. He had questions for the attorney, and they had nothing at all to do with corporate law.
The Bradleys lived in the foothills, in a new Spanish Colonial on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood with long green lawns that were a couple of missed waterings away from turning back to dust. A slender young woman opened the front door as Ethan parked on the curved flagstone driveway.
"Hey, Ethan." Peyton Bradley waved at the old motorcycle and sidecar. "That is so cool. And loud."
"Hi, Peyton. Your dad home?"
"Uh-uh. Don't know where he's gone. Come on, get out of the heat. It's like, what, a hundred and three? Can I get you something?"
"Glass of water, maybe."
"Sparkling?"
"Tap is good. Thanks."
Peyton was a pretty girl whose emotional affect was situated at the junction of cheerful and vacant. Ethan was more attracted to older women. Women who'd lived lives that showed in their eyes and the way they carried themselves. They liked him too. During his abbreviated college career, he'd had affairs with a forty-something psychology professor, an ancient history lecturer, and two comp sci instructors. Ms. Maddy Jones, his psych professor, had taken the direct approach: one day after class she'd locked the lecture hall door, dropped to her knees, and practically gnawed through the front of his jeans.
The history teacher had stuck with the classics and simply offered him a better grade for sex. He hadn't needed the academic help, but he'd enjoyed the extra tutoring.
So Ethan accepted, based on experience, that he had his share of natural gifts. But human beings confused the hell out of him. As fortune had permitted, he'd taken refuge in the world of algorithms, machines, and rational data.
"Irina might know where Dad is," Peyton grabbed a plastic cup from the dishwasher. "She's sunbathing out back."
"Was." Irina stood in the doorway, tall and tan and wearing only a white thong. Her brown shoulders, the soft peaks of her nipples, and her flat tummy glistened with oil. "I should thank you for making all that racket in the driveway. I'd have napped myself right into the burn ward. Foolish of me."
"You want ice?" Ethan caught the edge in Payton's voice. Losing a guy's attention to her exhibitionist stepmother apparently irritated her. She handed him the drink and left the kitchen.
"Lew went down to the office for some papers he's got to review over the weekend. He should be back in an hour or two. You can call him down there, I'm sure." Standing less than a foot from Ethan, she was tall enough that she barely needed to lift her chin to meet his eyes. "Unless there's something I can help with?"
"Well, I'm not sure. I just wanted to ask him why he'd pay a mechanic to put a GPS tracker on my mom's car."
Irina raised an eyebrow. "You're right. You'd have to ask him that yourself."
"Irina, that's not the way to play it. You're supposed to say it like this: 'What? I don't understand, why would he do that? I don't know what you're talking about.' Something like that. But make it your own."
She bit her lip. "I don't really think--"
"So, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you had your husband bug my mom's car because the Novaks told you to."
"Lew's warned me that you're a clever one."
"It's my profession to find patterns in random data. This one's obvious once you know to look for it. Isn't the most attractive thing about Lew his proximity to our money?"
"Easily," Irina agreed. "Ethan, we don't mean anyone harm. Everything we're doing will benefit you in ways you can't yet imagine." She leaned in close, smelling of coconut and orange blossoms. "Let me--let us--show you."
Her breath was a furnace. The sunlight through the window behind her haloed her fine dark hair, growing inexplicably brighter, eating into the shape of her head and burning away all detail and shadow until she completely dissolved into the flare. Ethan tried to shield his eyes from the fire, but moving was like walking on the ocean floor. Irina kept talking but the words were of no language that he knew. A roar like a jet engine rose inside his head, drowning her out.
Peyton's chipmunk soprano cut through the noise, echoing from the far side of the cosmos.
"Don't let him hurt himself!"
He pivoted drunkenly and grabbed with both hands at the melting granite edge of the kitchen island. It shrank from him like a frightened octopus and crumbled to sand, floating away. His hands came loose from his arms, chasing it until everything disappeared into the smothering dark.
Little by little, the watery pale light of a winter moon resolved into a frosted glass lamp in the center of an overhead fan. Ethan lay counting its turning wooden blades. Four. No, five.
To his left was a window looking out at the mountains. Long evening shadows filled the pockets and valleys of the range. He could raise and turn his head freely, but his wrists and ankles were bound by soft leather cuffs fitted with bolt snaps, which in turn were fastened to steel rings attached to wide straps made of heavy webbing. The webbing was looped and buckled around the mattress on which he lay. He was naked. It didn't bother him, as he was fairly sure the thousand-mile-long body strapped to the bed belonged to someone else. The erection jutting up from between his legs could not be his. He was big enough, but this thing was a stony, priapic monument. And anyway, it made no sense for him to be aroused.
"Wuh..." he shook his head hard to clear it. That was a mistake.
"Give yourself a moment, dear. There's no hurry." Irina's voice. She and Peyton stood by the bed looking down at him. They were naked as well. Okay, the hard-on made some sense, after all.
"I did good, huh, Mom?" Peyton leaned against her stepmother and offered her lips for a kiss. Irina's mouth closed on hers, elegant fingers caressed the arches of the young blonde's pelvis.
"Offhand, I...can...think...of five hibib...uh, hypnotic drugs that are tasteless in water." The stumbling, alien croak of Ethan's own voice startled him. He stared at his stubbornly erect dick again. "I'm betting that Libidramine isn't like that, though."
"Water? Oh, that was the benzos," Irina said. "You won't remember, but by the time we offered you Lib, you were more than willing. Enthusiastic, I'd say. You even helped us get you up here and into our playset. Thank God. I wasn't sure that the two of us together could carry you if you completely passed out."
Ethan nodded weakly. "I guess I just flunked Private Eye 101."
"When you saw Irina, I could've handed you a glass of sriracha and you'd have drunk it," Peyton teased.
Ethan hoped that keeping up aimless chatter would persuade Irina he was still fuzzy-headed. He hoped that he wasn't still more doped up than he thought he was.
Taking stock of his predicament, it was easy to see that neither woman was armed. The bondage rig he found himself in was as Irina had described it--no more sturdy than a playset. It shouldn't take more than two good strong yanks to tear something loose and to break free.
"You guys can yak if you want. I'm gonna play with his cock." Peyton climbed onto the bed. Her dark blue eyes were alight and her lips moistly parted as her finger circled the rim of Ethan's glans.
"Ah-ungh!" Overwhelming pleasure shot through Ethan's brain like a thunderbolt. His drugged sense of detachment from his body shattered and all thought of escape vanished in an instant; he had never been more physically present in his life.
Peyton giggled and clapped her hands.
"I'm afraid that you may have taken rather a lot of pills. There really was no stopping you." Irina smirked. "I called Lew and asked him not to hurry home. I promise you, he'll do whatever I request. You're about to find out exactly why. Lucky you."
Peyton kissed Ethan's cock. He screamed and convulsed against his restraints. The intensity of the stimulation was shocking.
"Oh, he likes that! He gets harder than Daddy. And he's a lot bigger."
"He's young. He has superior stamina, and he's in excellent physical condition," Irina explained. "I'm sure you'll find him a more satisfying fuck even than your beloved father." She approached her stepdaughter from behind and reached between the girl's legs. Peyton's eyes widened and she squealed. "Go on and suck him off now, little frog."
Peyton's mouth gaped open as automatically as if Irina had flipped a switch inside her. She lowered her head to swallow as much of Ethan's cock as she could. Her tongue swirled around his knob and she bobbed up and down, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat while her lips squeezed and milked his shaft.
He bucked spastically up off the mattress, gritting his teeth against crying out again.
Irina lay next to him and stroked his chest. She bit his ear playfully. "Peyton was so wonderfully naïve when we first met. So impressionable. Exploring her sexuality while under the amplifying influence of Lib has encouraged her spontaneity. She's extremely open to direction--especially when accompanied by the right kind of physical attention. She's my little slut, now." Irina tweaked his nipple, sending an exquisite tremor that reached to his balls. "She can be yours, too."
Teetering at the edge of sanity, Ethan tried to focus on something, anything other than the ecstatic bombardment of his senses. He struggled to recall Maddy Jones's class lectures on behavioral conditioning. Stimulus-response. Neurology...dopamine...the McGill studies.
Ages ago, researchers at McGill University had used electrodes to stimulate the pleasure centers of rats' brains, rewarding them for learning and repeating desired tasks. It had worked so well that, eventually, other doctors had tried to modify human behavior the same way--specifically, human sexual behavior. The ethical objections to that had been strenuous and, as far as anyone knew, succeeded at putting an end to the experiments.
Yet, the reward of orgasmic pleasure had proved to be far better at changing behavior than was punishment and deprivation. Give people a taste of something that made them feel good enough and they would do anything to get more of it. And if researchers gave control of the pleasure source to the experimental subjects, they'd give up everything else to indulge.
It was the very definition of addiction. In the case of the McGill rats, some had died of starvation chasing their electric bliss.
Peyton Bradley held Ethan's cock in both hands, eagerly sliding it in and out of her drooling mouth. She loved nothing better in the world than this. The rush of a man's blood to the engorged knob of his prick, making it grow larger still, stretching her lips tight around its girth, was sheer animal magic. She loved the wet tickling of her pussy cream leaking out past her cunt lips. Most of all, she loved the taste of cum; she never got enough of semen flooding her throat and filling up her mouth. God, how she longed to taste it again! She sucked greedily on Ethan's prick. He thrashed so hard against his bonds that she was afraid he'd throw her off, and she dug her fingers into the sinewy flesh of his thighs to steady herself as much as possible.
All the while, Irina's nimble fingers moved over Peyton's vulva and clitoris, silently coaxing her to let go and lose herself completely in the sensual thrill of sucking cock. Peyton so adored Irina that it seemed strange now to remember how crushed she'd been when the exotic, sensual woman had first entered her father's life. Dismay had turned quickly to devotion when Irina had introduced her to Libidramine, taken her to bed, and passed a long night fondling and fingering and licking her to mind-blowing climax after climax.
And then, her new stepmother had taught her how to fuck her father.
Irina was Peyton's north star, her teacher and her lover and her joy. Most importantly of all, Irina was her source of Lib.
"Ye- ow!" Ethan shook violently and jerked his ass upward, slamming his cock all the way down Peyton's throat. This was it--she pumped his prick madly as volley after volley of cum shot into her mouth. She clamped her lips tightly around the wide base of his cock, gulping and swallowing, desperate to milk every drop from him, to drain him completely. When his ejaculation slowed to a dribble she kept jacking him off, pulling her lips from his cock to kiss up and down the hard, saliva-soaked rod.
"Stay hard. Pleasepleaseplease. I need to fuck now. I need a cock in my pussy so bad."
"Don't worry about that, dear." Irina's throaty chuckle recalled Ethan from the edge of unconsciousness. He'd come so hard that he'd nearly blacked out, and his mind was as clouded as when he'd first awoken from his drugged slumber. She cradled his balls in her hand, and his sack tightened and swelled again as she rolled his testicles between her fingers. "See, what did I tell you? This stud is good for a few more rounds before we'll have to let him rest. And he'll recover quickly." She sat up and brushed a few strands of pale, sweat-matted hair out of Peyton's eyes, kissing her on the bridge of her nose. Peyton's eyes sparkled as Ethan's cock reared up, as hard as if he hadn't gotten his rocks off in days.
"Lick his balls," Irina commanded, and Peyton dropped her head to obey. "I want to suck his cock for a while." Irina sighed and said to Ethan, "I am so starved of good fuck-meat these days. As you might imagine."
"So then, the bloom is off the rose with old Lew?" Ethan adopted the most offhanded and mocking tone that he could manage. Forming words was hard, but the first shock of this new kind of drug experience was receding. He wanted to keep Irina talking. He assumed that she must use Lib herself, and Lew apparently functioned, more or less, under its influence as well. So Ethan hoped that he could habituate to it and find a way out of this captivity on his terms.
Irina sniffed. "Lew's a utility. He's a means to an end."
"What do you think of that, Peyton? You like the way New Mom talks about your Daddy?" Ethan couldn't tell if the girl even heard him, so intent was she on her ball-sucking.
"You needn't bother. She's outgrowing her Daddy crush. It's not so healthy for a young lady with Peyton's potential to get hung up on an older man who can never truly satisfy her needs. Surely you must agree that Lew is rather poor clay." Irina swiped her tongue-tip across Ethan's cock knob. The effect was intense but not as overpowering as when he had not known what to expect. "You, now you're the future. You're young and highly intelligent. And strong."
"And a partner in the firm you're trying to take over," Ethan prodded. "That's the most important part, and you left it out."
Irina paused in her cock-sucking and regarded him thoughtfully. "It's not so sinister as all that. I'll grant you that some of our ways of engaging with our negotiating partners have been unorthodox."
"Like spying on my mother? "
"Yes, well...In the end, all of you will profit handsomely from our merger. And I hope this afternoon to demonstrate the very personal benefits that will come to you, Ethan, by choosing to side with us."
"You might not believe this, Irina, but I've had better offers than 'drug-addicted sex slave.' Strange but true."
Irina laughed. "You're so cute. Oh, I'd love to just keep you here forever. However..." She swallowed his cock and twisted her head from side to side, corkscrewing her lips around him. Lights flashed behind his eyes and he nearly passed out again.
"Fuck now," Peyton murmured with a vacuous smile. She mounted him and slowly lowered herself onto his cock. The tip grazed her pussy and her sex lips spread wide to take him inside. His swollen glans entered her warm, creamy opening and he felt her shudder, the inner sleeve of her cunt flexing around his penetrating shaft.
"So much bigger," she sighed, halting her descent with less than half of his rod buried in her cunt. She wiggled up and down slightly, easing her way a little further down each time. "I gotta get it in me...Oh yeah...that's it, that's the way..." Her determination unnerved Ethan. Her small slit was so tight and she was so intent on her mission that he didn't think he was being too egotistical in worrying that she might injure herself. She must be stretched to the limit.
He needn't have been concerned. Peyton paused only briefly to catch her breath and get used to the massive intruder. Then she rode him, rising and falling, faster and faster, twisting and gyrating insanely.
His heart hammered in his chest like he was running a six-minute mile. Despite having come only minutes before, he was sure that he was seconds away from a second ejaculation. But he didn't orgasm. He couldn't. He lay suspended at that instant just before release, trapped in an indescribable euphoria that just went on and on and on.
Irina straddled Ethan's knees behind Peyton, reaching around to take her stepdaughter's small breasts in her hands. She kneaded the tender white flesh, pinching the young woman's erect nipples. Peyton inhaled sharply and closed her eyes. She bit down on her lower lip and her head rolled to one side. Irina kissed up and down the curve of her stepdaughter's neck so possessively she looked as if she might sprout fangs and go for blood. "Come now, darling. Come on that great...big... cock!"
Peyton stiffened and quaked, climaxing on command. "Atta girl. Come for Mommy." Irina winked at Ethan. "Isn't she a splendid fuck? And she's only going to get better with more experience. More partners."
"You're programming her."
"You are the dramatic one, aren't you? Peyton loves to fuck. Don't you, Peyton?"
"Love to fuck," Peyton repeated dreamily.
"See how happy she is? I'd say such single-minded dedication to pleasure is its own reward, but think about this, Ethan: how much will people pay for happiness? Or at least for total sexual satisfaction?"
Ethan couldn't answer. Everything was being stripped inexorably from his mind but primal rutting instinct, the last shreds of rational thought spinning away in a hurricane of drug-fueled lust.
"Milk him," Irina instructed her stepdaughter. Peyton's pussy contracted around his cock.
"God...gonna...you're killin' me...ungh... /i> mother...fuck..."
"Oh, now there's a thought." Irina moved forward to straddle his face. "Would you like that, Ethan?"
"What?"
"Your mother. You and Lauren. We can make that happen." Irina swung a leg over his head and lowered her pussy onto his face. Crazy with need, he pressed his mouth to her vagina and sucked hungrily, spearing his tongue up into her warm, slick slot. She squirmed contentedly. "Play along, and you can have anything you like. So why not dear old Mom?"
The soft tissues of her mound muffled Ethan's howls as he drove his cock up into Peyton and climaxed again.
Lauren and Stefan were crowded into one of the Land Rovers with Janet, a young man she introduced as Jakob, and two others for the long drive across the rugged cliff sides of Kai'ulau back to the Novaks' headquarters. Long stretches of the road were unpaved, and beyond the throw of the headlights was pitch darkness. Their driver took the fogbound curves like he was cruising the Autobahn.
The journey itself was harrowing, but the little that Lauren was able to learn from Janet along the way unnerved her far more. Jan seemed untroubled by her husband's disappearance and too vague on the details. Lauren suspected that she didn't want to talk freely in front of the others. The two women agreed to meet privately the next day.
Exhausted as she was, Lauren still slept badly. She woke breathless several times from weird dreams, sweating and wetly aroused. After dozing late into the morning, she wandered down a winding staircase to the great hall of the place that Jan had called the Hermitage and promptly got lost. The building was an odd combination of old and new, ancient stonework branching abruptly into corridor extensions of manufactured block and concrete and fluorescent lighting. She backtracked a couple of times, trying to remember Jan's directions of the previous night. Eventually, she found her way outside to an open courtyard.
A broad, curving flight of stone steps led down onto gardens bounded by a low crumbling wall. Jan lay sunbathing on one of two mattresses beside a sculptured fountain at the far end, naked save for big sunglasses. She sat up and waved at Lauren.
"There you are! Jet-lagged much?"
"My body has no idea what year it is." Lauren sat in a half-lotus on the second mattress, clad in her rinsed-and-wrung tee-shirt and a brief sarong skirt she'd found in a drawer of the rattan chest in her sleeping quarters. "Is there somewhere in the town where I can buy some things?"
"You mean like a cute little boutique kind of place? Nah. There's no tourist economy here. We're too far from everything. You know you're welcome to what's in my closet. Looks like we're still pretty much the same size. Someone should get some use out of all that stuff."
"Thanks. Uh, you wearing clothes at all, these days?"
Jan picked up a tumbler of amber liquid from the flagstone and sipped from it. "Not when I can help it. The climate is ideal for nudity. And clothes are a nuisance when I want a cock in me."
"Jesus Christ, Jan!"
Janet laughed, long and loud. "Your face!"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Lauren had a sleepy memory of Jan pawing Jakob like a horny teenager the previous night, just short of sitting in his lap for most of the drive. He'd returned her attentions casually, intent on his conversation with Stefan in a language Lauren didn't know.
"Wrong? Not a thing, hon," Janet said, seeming untroubled by Lauren's tone. She waved and raised her glass as if in a toast. "Welcome to Shangri-La. Hungry?"
"I don't eat in the morning."
"Morning's fled. Have some of this stuff. Tangerines and mangos and booze and I don't know what all else. It hits you on an empty stomach, maybe you'll unclench a little."
Lauren stared in disbelief. "I don't know you."
"Yes you do, Zonk. It's just been such a very long time." She reached over and brushed the backs of her fingers across Lauren's cheek. "Hasn't it?"
The unexpected use of the old nickname set Lauren back on her heels. Her pulse quickened and her stomach fluttered at Jan's touch-- at long-buried memories and feelings that she didn't appreciate her friend rekindling.
Perfect SATs had compensated for Lauren's mediocre high school GPA to get her into DeSoto State, where she'd flailed hopelessly away at freshman remedial algebra. A volunteer tutoring program had paired her with a severe, earnest sophomore named Janet Tucker, who appeared to exist in the world without family, friends, or any sense of humor whatever.
After two review sessions, Jan had looked at her pupil through her thick eyeglasses and announced, "Zonk, you're wasting your time and mine unless you're going to buckle down. Study more and party less. Like, a lot less."
The name meant nothing to Lauren. Her mother overheard the exchange and was tickled to explain it at dinner that evening. Turned out that the tutor did have a sense of humor, one that Lauren didn't much care for.
"You think I'm a dumb stoner."
"Zonker is not dumb," Jan objected, retreating to her most professorial manner. "He's the best character in the strip. He's a free spirit. Like you."
They'd stared at one another for a long time after that. Lauren didn't remember which of them had blushed and looked away first.
That was how they'd begun.
"This is not the time." Lauren's voice quavered. She moved away from Jan. "We have to talk about Frank. What happened?"
"Frank," Janet repeated with a puzzled frown. "I told you last night, Frank left."
"Yeah, so you said. He just walked out the door in the middle of the night without a word. You didn't talk to him. No one saw him."
"We weren't together. We were fighting. He was being crazy. Paranoid, like he was convinced we were in danger here. And he was mad because...Okay, you know I'm fucking Jakob?"
"Um, I kinda picked up on that, yeah."
"And Dominic, and...oh, a lot of guys. I'm fucking lots of guys now, all right? Frank couldn't stand to see that."
"How unreasonable of him." The significance of Janet's phrasing sank in. "Wait--you literally were having sex with other men in front of him?"
Appallingly, Janet giggled. "I was a faithful wife for twenty years, Lauren. Not that many good years, but what the hell. And then we came here, and, well, Lib just changes everything."
"You've completely lost your mind."
"Uh-huh. Didn't you say last night that you've used Libidramine yourself?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Did you take it with Jon?"
Lauren opened her mouth but could not speak. As she and Stefan had fucked through the night, she'd sworn that she would not stop if the hotel were burning down around them.
"Well...shit."
"The Natural Products Expo in Miami. Two years ago?" Janet reminded. "We roomed together. And I spent most of the weekend alone. How many times did you ball that sales rep from Utah? So don't judge, okay?"
"Jesus." Lauren took a deep breath and decided to try again. "Frank is missing. Left humiliated, got lost, got taken, whatever. Where is he?"
"I don't know."
"It's an island. There's one real town. How often are there even ships in the harbor? What's happened to your husband, Jan?"
"Nothing! He's not--Aleksandra says she has people looking for him. Frank's all right. They'll find him."
Pressing the point was futile. Jan had checked out, disassociating on a deep level, blocking those possibilities that were too terrible to bear...at least for now. Stockholm syndrome? Constant drinking? The Libidramine? Could those even be considered apart from each other? A chill ran through Lauren, mindful of the desperate imperative of the addict: protect access to the supply, whatever the cost.
The full weight of her own peril bore in on her for the first time. She'd rushed in, as usual, chasing something without forethought. And here she was on an island so distant and obscure that it wasn't on Wikipedia, completely dependent on her hosts for safe passage home. Lost among strangers. If she couldn't even reach Jan, she was utterly alone.
She had to be careful. Don't force Jan to confront what she couldn't. Ask safe questions that she might want to answer.
"Pour me a glass of that stuff," Lauren said with careful nonchalance, reclining on her mattress. "What've you learned so far, about Libidramine?"
"Hmm. That's the big one." Janet's eyes brightened. She pursed her lips as if her pupil had asked her to explain polynomials. Lauren smiled despite herself. "Okay, so it's derived from the blossom of a plant called Tiare Aeaea. So named by Père Thomas, a French Catholic priest who was a botanist and zoologist. Those were his hobbies. His day job was saving the wretched souls of the hedonistic savages."
"God's work. Seems to have been a bust."
"Uh-huh. For reasons." Janet gestured toward the monastery. "There's a trove of old documents in there. Copies of charts and logbooks that belonged to the French sailors, journals kept by the colonists, genealogies and weather logs kept by the monks...all kinds of cool stuff. Aleksandra's turned me loose in the Hermitage library. She's as curious about Kai'ulauan history as I am, and my French is way better than hers.
"There are later writings in English, too. Like, you ever hear of the Nancy B. Flanagan? It was a whaling schooner that disappeared out here in the mid-1800s. Turns out they shipwrecked on Kai'ulau. Twenty-three crew, all of them black freedmen. Modern islanders are quite a mix, Polynesian and European and African."
"Yeah, that's real interesting. But about the flowers..."
"From Father Tom's notes and what I can look up online, when the Internet even works here, I'd guess the plant is an unknown variety of Sclerotheca. There are less than a dozen cataloged species. And Aeaea only grows on Kai'ulau."
"That's remarkable. And very convenient for the Novaks."
"But not as odd as you might think. It has a cousin, Apetahi, that only grows on the slopes of one extinct volcano on Raiatea. No one knows why. I bet if there was a fuck-load of money to be made from it, someone would figure out how to transplant it pretty quick. So you see why the family's keeping this close. Why they want so badly to control distribution."
"Keep the secret. Stretch out the window of exclusivity as long as possible. Can't say I exactly blame them. But look, how does the drug work? What's it doing to us?"
"Hon, I've got no idea." Janet laughed. "I'm just a schoolgirl scientist. And they've got no research labs here. But you know that as soon Lib gets out onto the market all the pharma giants will be all over it looking for something they can synthesize and patent. Every government--"
"Will want to control it. Don't you think this is dangerous, Jan? It's--"
"It'll be disruptive as hell," Janet agreed. "I haven't told you the half of it. Now, as nearly as I can tell, Lib just supercharges every system of the body. You become more of whatever you already are. It heightens your senses--makes every experience way more intense. Increases your metabolic efficiency, stamina, pain tolerance. And obviously, it jacks your sex drive into the stratosphere. I stay hornier than a submarine crew on a weekend pass in Bangkok." Jan cocked her head and winked at Lauren mischievously. "And how are you feeling?"
"Goddamn, cut it out."
"I'm totally serious. Listen to your body, Laur. Motor running a little hot?"
"Jan, I really don't want to--"
"You realize that you're breathing Lib right now?"
"What!"
"Pollen from the blossoms is carried on the wind, everywhere on the island. It's been part of Kai'ulauan culture for a thousand years. They use the plant in traditional medicine. They cook with it. They bury their dead with garlands of it, which, if you ask me, really is missing the point.
"It affects everyone all the time. After a few days here, Frank and I were both so hot and bothered that, well, by the time Jakob gave us the refined drug I was primed and about to explode."
She brought her face close to Lauren's. "And the same thing's happening to you. How'd you sleep last night?"
Jan pulled Lauren close and kissed her, tongue darting at the corners of Lauren's mouth.
"Don't start this again, Jan. Please. Not...not now." Both knew too well that her reluctance was not refusal. Jan angled a leg over both of Lauren's and slid a hand under her friend's sarong to cup her buttocks.
Lauren's heart pounded, and she twisted as if to pull away. But physical impulse won out over willpower, and she ground her vulva against Janet's thigh. Pushing Lauren's shirt up off of her breasts, Jan lowered her face and sucked one large flat areola into her mouth. She bit the hardening nipple lightly and lashed it with her tongue.
"Now is a perfect time." Jan moved to the other breast and continued sucking. Lauren trembled from head to toe. It as was if no time at all had passed, and they were nineteen and twenty and together in the little attic bedroom of her mother's row house on Munsee Island. "Come on, lady, I want you naked."
A flash hotter than the tropic sun shot through Lauren at Jan's words. She hesitated for half a heartbeat before tugging the knotted cotton at her waist loose and pulling her sarong free. She let Janet pull her shirt off. They were naked together. She ran her hand through Janet's short hair, fingers caressing the nape of her neck, holding her close. So much had changed, and so little; Janet was still the one leading them down the path that they both wanted so desperately to tread.
The young teacher had not quite seduced her student, the first time. Janet was too reticent for that, and Lauren was more sexually experienced than she. But Lauren had only been with guys. Once she'd made the first move Janet had taken over. Jan was a voracious reader, and it turned out that her interests had ranged well beyond studious immersion in Mendel, Kant, and Al-Khwarizmi. Her favorite British author was not Bronte or Keats, but a prolific Victorian who'd signed their work "Anon." She had a riotous imagination and ideas of her own that she was dying to try with someone. She could be aggressive, dominating, and tender at the same time.
"I don't know what it is about you," she'd confided. "I've never been close to anyone. Never had a good friend that I can think of, really. All those foster homes...I guess I just don't attach."
Enthralled, Lauren had attached to Janet with a vengeance. They'd done everything together. Whether in or out of bed, Janet somehow always led. She'd talked their way into jobs on Jon and Frank's food truck. When Lauren had surprised herself by falling for Jon, rather than being jealous Jan had maneuvered it so that they became a foursome.
What had come next still stung. Remembering, Lauren pushed Janet away. "You ended us."
"I gave you up." Janet looked stricken. "When I married Frank...he wasn't who I thought he was. He changed."
"Don't hang it on someone else."
"I'm not blaming him. Okay, maybe that is what I did for a long time. That was wrong. I loved him, and he had fixed ideas of how things were supposed to be, in a marriage. I didn't want him to leave. We were all so laser-focused on getting along, on building this wretched business." Her vehement dismissal of Blue Oasis shocked Lauren. "You and Jon were crazy about each other, anyway. And I guess I just thought, you know, it was time for me to grow up."
She held Lauren and kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. "God, my heart has been in two pieces for so long. I'm so sorry."
Resentment and grief that Lauren had clung to for decades evaporated in the hot surge of her blood and the thrill of carnal reunion.
What Jan said about the Tiare must be true, then. There wasn't the extreme kick of rampant horniness that Lauren had experienced with Stefan--but then, Lib was a concentrated version of whatever was in the red flowers. The pollen's effect was more subtle but just as irresistible. And Jan's confession touched her.
Broken pieces.
"I feel like a piece of me is missing," Lauren had told Jon after Janet had ended their group relationship. "Like I've got a phantom limb that still aches." Jon had listened, without understanding. She had him, after all; why would she need anyone else? That was when what she'd lost had hit her hardest.
Lauren cradled Janet, covering her mouth in a long kiss. "You are insidious. You always have the words that make me want..."
"I've never made you do a thing, Zonk. I can't believe that anyone ever has."
Janet trailed her fingers down Lauren's stomach to her crotch, drawing lazy patterns on her velvet mound, not quite touching her moistening pussy yet. Lauren's labia swelled. Janet circled around her clitoris, fingers drawing closer and closer. "Yesss..." Lauren sighed. She squeezed her thighs together, trying to trap that teasing hand between them but Jan evaded her. Jan's eyes were dreamy and heavy-lidded. She smiled with satisfaction, coaxing Lauren's clit out of its hood. Her fingertip directly stroked the exposed, swollen pink button.
Lauren sucked in her breath. She squirmed and moaned and molded herself to Janet, mouth to mouth and tit to tit and belly to belly. Janet's nimble fingers brought her to the edge of climax just to let her slide away again. Once, twice...
Moaning, Lauren put her hand to the parting of Janet's legs, finding the blonde's soaking pussy.
"Oh yeah. Play with me, too," Jan murmured. "Right here, just now, there's only us." Her low, husky tone soothed and excited Lauren both at the same time. "No Jon. No Frank, no Ethan..."
"Ethan?" Lauren started.
Janet dipped a finger into Lauren's slit. "Wow, you're really gushing." She nibbled at Lauren's earlobe and whispered. "Because I mentioned Ethan? Oh, look at that! My girl has a secret! You know, on second thought I wouldn't mind having Ethan here right now. I don't think you would, either."
"Stop it!" Lauren protested. "Now you're just saying awful things. Like always."
"Only because it always gets you hot." Janet curled two fingers up inside Lauren's pussy, working them upward along her inner walls. "Why is it so awful, to want Ethan? "I'd sure want him if he were mine. There must be so many opportunities, for the two of you."
"Don't...talk like that..."
"Come on, you like it. You're not so alone. I think about Ethan a lot. He looks so much like you. Same eyes. Same mouth...I've sat through so many goddamn meetings at the office, watching him, all wet in my underpants. Now, isn't that awful, me wanting to fuck my best friend's great big stud of a son?"
Lauren cried out. Janet straddled her, peppering her throat and shoulders and breasts with little kisses. Her probing fingers massaged the sensitive nerve cluster deep inside Lauren's vagina that they both knew would drive her insane. "Didn't Stefan tell you, the Kai'ulauans don't care about such things? Incest is no big deal here. Another thing to love about this place. If Ethan were here now we could fuck him together. You and me. Imagine it...that's right...Has he got a big dick, hmm? Have you seen it? Of course you have! Your son's got a great big cock that belongs right here--"
Jan thrust three fingers in and out of Lauren's cunt in a fast fucking motion, as if they were a penis. Lauren shrieked and exploded in an orgasm so intense that the world grew dark around her. Her breath came in ragged gasps as she fought her way back from the brink of unconsciousness.
"You're more beautiful than ever," Jan mumbled. She kissed Lauren's breasts, fondling them and pleasuring her nipples with long slow licks and little nibbles. "So womanly. You're all new, again." She kissed her way down Lauren's belly and along one inner thigh as far as the knee before moving to the other and making her way with agonizing slowness back up to her warm, wet target. She blew softly on Lauren's clitoris. "Pretty pussy."
Lauren spread her legs wider apart, knees trembling. The wet tip of Jan's tongue edged up between her labia and she arched her hips automatically toward Jan's mouth. "Don't stop...please don't stop!"
"If I had my way I'd never stop. I'm gonna drink you dry," Janet opened her mouth wide, pressed her lips to Lauren's vulva, and sucked. Her tongue darted up into the hot little opening of Lauren's pussy, swiping and licking and swallowing every drop of nectar that she could find.
" Awh ...turn around! Turn around!" Lauren pushed at Janet's shoulders and clutched her short blond curls, urging her into a side-by-side sixty-nine. She parted Janet's pussy lips with two fingers and snuggled her face between Janet's legs, pushing her tongue as far into Janet's slit as she could.
Janet's pussy contracted around Lauren's tongue as she came twice in rapid succession. The taste of her and the thrill of having her this way once again triggered Lauren's own orgasm. She had never stopped yearning for the way that they had been together. How each had learned the other's body and appetites. How they could go on pleasing one another for hours. In their first months together Janet had come as close as she ever would to failing a course, too worn out from marathon nights of orgasmic joy to attend her morning classes.
It occurred to Lauren that, if Libidramine increased female sexual capacity to anything like the degree that it did Stefan's male stamina, she and Janet might well starve to death out here before they satisfied their mutual craving.
Breath by shared breath and heartbeat by heartbeat, Lauren's fear melted away. There was no danger here. This island and its strange fruit were not threats, but the answer to her unuttered prayers.
Or, maybe that was the drug talking.
The voice of doubt was never still.
The shadows of the palms lining the courtyard had grown long when Lauren awoke. Janet napped with her head tucked into the crook of her friend's arm. After a while, Lauren put a hand on Jan's hip and rocked her gently to rouse her.
"How long you been up?"
"A few minutes."
"Awake and thinking. I can see your wheels turn, you know. There are two little open windows in the front of your head."
"Is it true, what you said about this place, and, you know, family relationships?"
"Relationships? Do you mean sex?" The voice was not Janet's, but that of a small, dark woman who stood nearby watching them curiously. She was naked, voluptuous, and carried herself like an empress. "Yes, it is. And why not?"
The woman crouched beside the couple, extending her hand.
"Lauren Chase? Welcome to Kai'ulau. I'm Aleksandra Novak."
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