Chapter Eighteen
Dancy was used to winning, not being won. She was accustomed to taking whatever awards and rewards she wanted out of life through the easy effects of her body and mind. But she hadn’t ever imagined ruling, something few Americans can really grasp. Here in El Gavilan she was conscious of the potential. Here was the feudal estate, the stone castle surrounded by loyal and dependent peasants, the hub of vast military and trade endeavors from which vassals reported and brought tribute. Armando sat on a very real throne, concerned with but untroubled by his powerful neighboring states. And she sat beside him, a queen real as any ever, secure in the power of her blood, in the body that was her birthright. She lounged on her throne like a leopard, looking out at the realm, considering her man and his boundaries.
She enjoyed freedom of the grounds, but had no illusions of being able to leave Armando’s domain. That’s not all she was enjoying. There were technicolor birds making exotic soundtrack noise in the trees, gorgeous flowers growing wild in the jungle, fish among the waterfalls and boulder-strewn pools of the streams, glimpses of deer, sign of horses, tracks of heavier animals with cloven feet, a few monkeys that simply had to be imported. Maybe the whole works was imported. Armando obviously didn’t do anything halfway. By no means, she smiled, still feeling a little tightness in her stride. Not exactly bruised, but significantly plundered. Call him a nine, maybe eight point eight. Stan had started off as an eight and worked his way down to a five.
She loved getting off the foot trails and moving through the jungle like a deer. Like the ghost of a deer, was her goal. Gliding by the trees without a sound, slipping around branches like a flow of hot fudge, sliding through foliage as if it were a caress, bounding up rivulets rock to rock without leaving footprints. Once she found a grove of heavy vines and worked on the Tarzan shtick, which turned out to be trickier than she’d thought, but once mastered it was rapid transit. She got it down cold before stripping down and swinging through the trees naked. It stoked her up so wild and beautiful she didn’t even regret that it hadn’t been on film; gold goddess whooshing silently through the shrieking green.
Her favorite discovery was a pool twenty feet long and nine wide, carved from a basalt shelf by the turbulence of a waterfall, gradually lengthening as the falls chiseled away the stream bed above, cutting a mini-canyon with walls of hanging rock garden, a ceiling of green canopy with a round vault of blue sky, and a floor of slick black stone and fine white sand under three feet of crystalline water. She called it The Jacooze, and stopped by for a plunge every day after cruising the wilderness. A freshup before trotting down to the castle and dressing for dinner.
She’d piled her clothes on this perfect dry rock shelf and was doing laps in the pool, back crawl up, underwater breast stroke back on one breath. She was starting to see the whole scene differently, not so much as a Sheena thing, but a Disney animation with herself as a sort or Barbie/Tinkerbell singing a Grammy-nominated song in the forest dell, swimming through modesty bubbles with bright-colored fish and parrots as a balletic chorus. Beautiful downtown Fantasia, she thought, ending a lap by skimming in under the falls to the narrow cave behind the thin veil of water.
Inhaling the mist, she stood on one foot, sticking the other leg out through the curtain of water like a chorine. She did a few slow flexes of the leg then edged her hip through the water curtain, absorbed in the way the rushing water wrapped her leg. Her other hand thrust out of the water, moving around to play with the flow dynamics, then doing a vampy come-hither gesture that extended into the gradual emergence of her breast, first just a shape of rushing water, then gradually taking on color and form, then bursting forth into the sunshine, gleaming with a slick coat of water. The other breast followed, and the other arm, as she did a spreading pose like Evita–or possible a Screen Gems hood ornament.
The she slowly lowered her head, her chin leading her face into the light, coming out of the water like the birth of a nyead. She stood there with her eyes closed, arms spread up into the water in a “Y”, the slightest motion of her hands diverting different streams of water across her body, her calves disappearing back into the crashing whitewater below. She shook her head and laced a string of droplets across the surface. She opened her eyes and was looking directly across the pool at a naked man, waist deep in the water and staring at her stunned, as though he’d just witnessed the birth of Venus.
He’d wrapped the deal. Everything was set, his brain child was delivered, and he was happy to be back with good news. But somehow he felt dirty and tense. It was probably those damn Peruvians. They always put him off. He bounded down the steps of the plane and straight to the gleaming black Buick Park Avenue, speaking to no one. The talking would come later. The big Buick purred out of the hangar and headed directly to the river, cutting across fields to get there. Men in straw hats waved to him as he dusted over to the edge of the woods, working the big car onto a wagon path that led up beside the river. In the clearing at the path’s end he got out and stood a while, just listening to the river and jungle. He kicked his expensive black oxfords into the car, tore off his tie and threw it across the front seat. He rolled up the legs of his Italian silk suit pants and started up the stream, hopping rocks and wading in the current.
When he reached his favorite swim pool he peeled off the suit jacket and shirt, feeling their world slipping away from him with the soft fabric. He tugged at his belt and zipper, stepping out of his trousers naked and alive. He’d just eased into the pool when he saw a woman’s leg emerge from the waterfall, bouncing slowly, flexing to move the graceful curves up and down the calf. Then an arm snaked out of the water like an eel, pointed directly at him and motioned him forward. He almost fell to his knees. He was obviously experiencing a mystical appearance of, if not the Virgin exactly, somebody pretty damned supernatural. No human woman could have limbs as fine and as golden as this water sprite. He felt like crossing himself just to be sure, but then what would he do with his hard-on? So he just stood, waist deep, and stared.
And the goddess’ breasts materializing, water becoming miraculous flesh like the old priests had talked about, but a lot more fascinating. The most beautiful female body in the world stood before him shimmering and streaming, wreathed in rainbows and lacy foam, hovering between moving water and actual flesh.
Then the head emerged and he saw the face. And he was a goner. High priest to a new church of his own recent revelation. The golden hair thrashed a rain of diamonds across the pool, then the great eyes opened and he looked in to them. He felt his soul start to swell, to plunge across the water into those eyes. Then the goddess yelped like a puppy and dived into pool, the waters smoothly parting around one colossal ass.
His reaction was instantaneous, as unthinking as blocking a punch, as a bear seeing and swatting a leaping salmon. He plunged forward, bounding towards the spot where the apparition had submerged. He dived down into the pool looking around in the bright green water. And he saw her.
Actually what he saw was a pale and hazy icon of the female form with green sunlight speckling through from behind, creating a sort of aura around her twisting white form, shaped like the distillation of male desire but shrouded in light and mystery like a mystic vision. He drew close to her and she stopped moving, as though awaiting him. He slowly rose to the surface, his eyes rising past the monumental proportions, a sunken city of prurience.
When his head broke the surface, he was looking right into her face and she looked at him unafraid, motionless, silent. He approached her as slowly and softly as he could, less afraid of flushing her than causing her to vanish. He stared into her eyes from inches away, smelling her breath, feeling the movement of water that the action of her lungs excited and whorled. It never occurred to him to speak to her. As if such a creature could speak his language or would have anything to say to a mortal.
He knew he shouldn’t and he fought against it, but he had to do it. He reached out a dripping hand and gently touched the immaculate curvature of her shoulder. It was real flesh. And such flesh. Within three heartbeats he held her between his hands, caressing the slick, firm flesh. None of what he felt seemed believable, but it was all very real. And he was responding to it so much that it actually caused him pain. The tip of his straining cock brushed against a fringe of fur, the contact zapping him practically senseless. He caught his breath, staring at her to see if she had noticed. Her eyes fluttered, then closed. Her head didn’t move, but below the surface he felt her float up and open around him, sitting weightless on his erection like a sawhorse.
He groaned and let his hands slip around to the muted architecture of her back, clasping her to him, her hard cold nipples punching into his pectorals. As he did she slid down him like a banister, her golden fleece grinding into his coarse Indian pubic hair. He buried his face in her throat to stifle the savage cries that were being torn from him. And felt her feet on the backs of his knees, felt her hips arch out and away, then move back in, pulsing him up inside her. At which point, he totally lost control, memory, and most of his mind.
He was in her and on her like a driven dog, humping her straight up into the air, then pounding her into the water. She was agile as an otter, slithery as an eel, and did some pounding of her own. They thrashed the water into a froth, kicked the silt from the bottom into great clouds around themselves, rolled over and over like demented alligators, damn near drowned. And neither said anything you could call a word.
Dancy lay back in the water, floating up into the sky on the trailing feathers of her orgasm, paddling with sinuous, swirling motions, her hair streaming along her back and breasts. She felt the turbulence of the cascade and gave a quick scissor kick that propelled her under it, to tumble loose and limp under the frothy force of foaming water. Finding footing, she stood up under the falls, throwing her head back to stare straight up into the stinging white stream. I should always have sex in surroundings that feel like sex, she thought.
Martillo had dived deep under, doing an awkward breast stroke with his eyes open to the fuzzy green light. He squatted on the bottom and kicked hard with both legs, exploding from the surface like a breaching whale, and landing in a crouch, looking around the pool for his new mate. There was nobody in sight. Which he’d almost anticipated. He climbed a rock by the shore and scanned the pool. Nobody. She’d disappeared or turned back into water or something. Of he’d imagined it all. He looked down, inspecting his cock closely. Yeah, it had been in some kind of action. Like that proved anything. He stepped down from the rock and padded over to his clothes. With a last look around the pool, he threw his jacket over his shoulders and walked back down the path to the solid black shape of his Buick. There’d been something just too unreal about the whole thing anyway. Things that happen in the jungle, he’d learned, haven’t always really happened.
Dancy stuck her head out of the waterfall just in time to see her apparition fade off into the bulrushes. Draped in an Armani jacket. What the hell? She shook her head, tipped it to splash out her eyes, and looked again. He was gone. She stepped out from under the waterfall and put her hand between her legs, here eyes narrowing and softening. What the fuck just happened here, she wondered. She could just see the top ramparts of the castle through the clearing above the pool and gave a sudden thought to her status. Then she snickered and flopped on her back to float languorously among the boulders. “Well,” she murmured to the trees overhead, “A fantasy can’t be held against you.”