SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

Mike Gannon leaped from the wooden dock onto the two men who stood with ax handles in their hands on the deck plankings of his barge, the Lady Luck. They heard the wind of his dive a second too late. As they turned he barreled into them, sending both of them sprawling across the deck. An ax handle went flying through the air. One man banged the hatchway coaming with the back of his head and lay unmoving. 

Gannon lifted the second man off the deck boards with a hand on the lapels of his dark blue pea jacket. With his other hand clenched into a big fist, he drove it hard against the face before him. He heard the crunch of cartilage as his knuckles rammed a nose. His fist came back and struck again. 

“You tell Black John Bennett to come himself next time he wants to put me out of business!” 

His left hand opened and dropped the unconscious bargeman and now he whirled, seeing two more men coming up the few steps of the companionway, wicked belaying pins off a Great Lakes freighter in their fingers. They were grinning wolfishly at the sight of him, expecting easy prey. 

Mike Gannon did not wait for their rush. He took two long steps and then he was before them, booted foot lifting to drive hard into the chest of one, slamming him backward into the hold while his other hand caught at the forearm of the second man, bringing it down hard across his knee. He had no time to think of niceties of conduct. Against two armed men and himself weaponless, he was concerned only with self-preservation. 

Mike applied pressure to the forearm across his knee and the man screamed, "Jesus, man—let be! You'll break it." 

"It's what I'm aiming to do, you fool!” 

The man screamed again, thickly, his cry drowning out the sound of the snapping bone. Gannon lifted him and hurled him against the cabin wall. Then he was driving blindly down the companionway stairs into the blackness of the hold, expecting to feel the thudding impact of a belaying pin against his skull. 

A red fury held him in its grip. He'd known for a long time that Black John Bennett was crowding out the other, smaller barge owners and canal captains. A raid of bully boys, a broken skull or two, and your canawler was always ready to settle for a sale to Bennett Enterprises, usually at a loss to himself and at a fine margin of profit for Black John. 

The Bennett empire was expanding, all along the Erie Canal. 

Now Black John had put his mark on the Lucky Line and Captain Mike Gannon. Well, the hell with Black John! He'd throw his toughs right back in his face. Nobody got the Lucky Line. Nobody at all. He had built it up from one barge, five years before, right after Moira Kennally—damn her lovely eyes—had thrown him over for that rich bastard, Creegan—until now the Lucky Line stood second only to Black John's Empire Barges. 

He poised in the darkness, crouched down, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the dimness of the hold. There was no belaying pin to his skull, nor rush of pounding feet. Whoever waited down here for him wanted all the odds in his favor, because he was afraid. 

Mike Gannon chuckled to himself. Two could play at this game. He went forward lightly for all his two hundred pounds of solid bone and muscle, knowing this hold as he knew his own face. Here were the tanned leather goods out of Gloversville and over yonder the glassware from Corning. He could make out the crated machine parts from Albany and the bales of men's and women's wear from Troy. 

A footfall sounded. 

He whirled, instinctively knowing where to go. Now that his back was turned the roustabout would be making for the companionway stairs, having no stomach for a knockdown, drag-out fight with this man who'd already disposed of three of his companions. 

He saw the man outlined against the sunlight in the hatchway opening, scrambling up the stairs, sobbing in fright. Mike launched himself in a diving tackle. His shoulder hit the man behind his knees, driving them viciously into a tread. His arms locked tight. 

Rolling and thumping down the stairs, they hit the hold planks and now Gannon twisted like a big cat to pin his man down. His fist was a pile driver, lifting and falling. When the man beneath him slumped limply, he rose and shook himself. Reaching down, he tangled fingers in the thick mackinaw and dragged the man out onto the deck, dropping him like a sack of potatoes beside his unconscious fellows. 

One by one he doused them with water from a bucket. 

As a man stirred and sat up, Mike growled, "Tell Black John to come himself next time. Now what was it you were about to do to my Lucky Lady?” 

“We rigged a nail keg of dynamite with a long fuse so she'd blow when we were well away from here," the man mumbled between mashed lips. 

"A kind of bomb, then. All right. Come down in my hold, all of you, one at a time, nice and easy, and take your bomb away with you." 

He gripped an ax handle himself now, and the four bully-boys eyed it warily as they walked ahead of him, moving slowly and afraid. Under his watchful stare they disconnected the fuse from the dynamite, handling it gingerly. Mike felt his flesh crawl at the sight of it. If that thing had gone up, his fine new barge would be a flaming ruin. Hate ran like a vein of acid in his body, but he controlled himself as one of the dock-wallopers tucked the keg under an arm and made for the companionway stairs. 

Mike Gannon watched them go, knowing this was not the end of it, nor even the beginning. Black John would strike again. If that failed, he would keep hitting and trying until one day he had Mike Gannon where he wanted, a broken man, and the Lucky Line all for himself. 

He drove the ax handle at a piling as he watched the four bully-boys walk away down Canal Street. Maybe he ought to gather a few of his own musclemen and pay Black John a visit, smash his nose or his teeth with one of his own ax handles. A fighting itch grew inside him he wanted to feel flesh bruising under his fists. 

"If I weren't going to Rome first thing in the morning in the Lucky Penny, I would." 

Moira Kennally Creegan lived in Rome now. After five years he might get to see her. Thinking about black-haired Moira, a different kind of excitement began to build in his blood. He sighed and dropped the ax handle, calling himself a fool. 

The afternoon shadows were growing longer. Here and there in the saloons and honky-tonks gas lamps were coming on, throwing a yellow radiance into the twilight. A piano twinkled a light melody into the gathering darkness. Captain Mike Gannon turned his stare up the cobbled length of Canal Street. The most sinful street in the world, the folks north of the Liberty Pole in The Terrace said of it. 

Up there, along Delaware Avenue and Main Street, were the respectable people of Buffalo, folks who thought Canal Street a crying shame and tried every once in a while to do something about it. Gannon guessed nobody could do very much. Even President Grover Cleveland—when he'd been sheriff of Erie County back in the '70s— had failed to wipe out Big Ditch Street. It would need a mighty big eruption to do that, he supposed. 

Canal Street averaged a dozen fights a night, one murder every other night. The good people of the city secretly hoped there'd come a night when everybody down here would murder everybody else so decent society could come in and clean it up.

"I'll never live to see the day,” he philosophized. 

Just the same, Canal Street had been good to him. His first barge had multiplied to three and then five. At this moment he owned ten, and had upwards of eighty men on his payroll. He had made a name for the Lucky Line up and down the canal. Only John Bennett's Empire Barges was a larger outfit than his own. 

He shoved hands deep into his pea jacket pockets and turned away from the canal, past the wooden pilings, step ping over refuse and garbage as he went. A wonder folks along the canal didn't all die of disease, with all this filth lying around. A huge gray rat clung to a bit of rotted meat, its beady eyes fastened on him boldly. 

The sky was darkening rapidly. Gas lamps began to glow a little brighter. Three sailors off one of the Great Lakes freighters came weaving down the street, arm in arm. One of the sailors saw him and cupped a hand to his mouth. 

“No money, canawler?” 

Gannon grinned and waved an arm. There was always an uneasy truce when a canal man met a Great Lakes sailor. 

Captain Gannon straightened slowly. She was regarding him with thin eyebrows arched, a faint smile on her wide red mouth. No doubt about it. This was the woman who had blown him a kiss from her bedroom window. 

"Joe," she called. "Bring my dinner. And ask the captain if he cares to join me.” 

Without another glance, she moved down the stairs and across the back of the room to a table. The long saloon formed an ell at this point, the short end becoming a tiny theater for the curtained stage. Tables and chairs had been set up here, where the sailors and bargemen could take their ease and enjoy the shows. 

A bartender brought a plate filled with steaming corned beef, boiled potatoes and a wedge of cabbage. Captain Gan now found himself moving forward to hold the chair for her. 

"I saw you standing on the street, didn't I, Captain?” she asked, letting him slide the chair under her. 

"You did that. It's why I came in here." 

"You flatter me, Captain Gannon. As a Canal Street woman I'm not used to flattery." Her hand lifted. "Joe, bring the captain a drink. He's a rare visitor. Perhaps we can make him a steady customer." 

Her face was broad, with a ripely sensual mouth and a wide forehead above which brown hair had been coiffed into a high-crowned up-sweep Her ears were tiny, her nose straight, her eyes large and intensely brown. The color of her skin was dusty, almost a café-au-lait, giving her a foreign, exotic look, and the manner in which her smooth brown shoulders rose upward out of the low collar of her evening gown suggested that the body beneath it might be as challenging and as exciting as the face itself. At the moment her eyes were brilliant under the mascara and blue eye paste, bold and challenging. A faint touch of hardness showed itself in the lines at the corners of her vividly out lined mouth and in the sardonic arch of her plucked eyebrows. He judged her to be in her early thirties. 

"Looking for fun, Captain?"

"If I am, have I found it?” 

She considered that, head tilted sideways as she ate. Mike Gannon found her a very attractive woman. The memory of her large breasts was still fresh in his mind. The thought came to him that he had been a long time without a woman in his arms, and that sometimes a man was a fool to devote his every waking moment to business. He moved a little in his chair and found his knee against her thigh. She did not move from the contact. 

The Egyptian had been eating steadily. Now she glanced at him sideways and put down her knife and fork. "You said that like a challenge." 

"Maybe I meant it as a challenge.” 

"When I was a little younger, Captain, I was never one to refuse a dare. Seems that's what you're doing right now—daring me.” 

"And if I were?” 

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "I don't use the entertainers' rooms, Captain. By that I mean I don't sell myself to ordinary customers. Man wants me, he has to come right out and tell me so.” 

She stood up abruptly, kicking back the chair. "I have work to do. I don't let anything interfere with that. If you're still here by midnight, I'll see you again." 

She swept away, the Polonaise gown rustling to her stride. Under that striped piqué her hips moved evenly, gracefully. Either she was firmly fleshed down there or she was wearing a corset. Captain Gannon chuckled. Might be fun to find that out for himself, come a few minutes after midnight. 

His hand lifted and a bartender slipped around the edge of the bar toward him. Half a dozen men were lined up over the brass rail now, starting the evening off with straight rye. In an hour The Mummy Case would be filling up. 

"Joe, if I order tonight, water down my drink. I'll pay you the same rates as for straight stuff. I just don't want my thinking to get too fuzzy." 

Gannon rose and stretched, the food and liquor warm in his middle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw three big men come through the door. The man who walked a little ahead of the others was Black John Bennett. He wondered if Bennett was hunting him. Moving toward the little stage, Mike Gannon pursed his lips thoughtfully, crossed to the wall and wrenched loose the thick leg of a chair. He tucked the makeshift club up his trousered leg as he sat down. It never hurt a man to be ready for trouble. 

Seated at his little table, sipping his watered whiskey slowly, he waited for discovery. Would Bennett come with a roaring curse and flailing fists? No, probably not. Bennett fancied himself a respectable man. He sent his dock-wallopers out on the dirty jobs—to burn the barges and crack the skulls of the men who dared to stand up to him—while he himself sat in a nice clean office, usually in a white shirt and with a tie on. 

Tonight he was slumming. Or it just might be that he was out to finish off Mike Gannon. Those two men with him were hulking brutes, muscular and powerful, with hard, savage faces, wearing turtle-neck sweaters and blue mackinaws. The best of his bully-boys? Mike grinned coldly. Black John would need them if he started trouble. 

Black John Bennett was as big a man as Gannon, but he was given to putting on weight so that he seemed much heavier. There was a puffiness about his hard black eyes and a bluish sheen to his shaven cheeks. He wore a checkered vest strung with a gold watch chain from which swung a gleaming five-dollar gold piece like a banner to announce his coming. His clothes were clean and carefully pressed, his frock coat with high lapels thrown back negligently to show the coin watch charm. He came between the tables as men drew back before him, glancing at him, then turning to whisper to their neighbors. 

There was an arrogance about the man that drove splinters of fury into Mike Gannon. His hand itched to swing the chair leg; still, he told himself, he'd not be the one to start trouble here, despite what had happened on the Lady Luck a little earlier. And so he drew back further into the shadows and waited. 

The room was filling rapidly now. The aproned waiters ran this way and that with trays and, periodically, a bar tender would scurry over with Mike's watered special so he might keep his throat wet while he watched the show. He had waved away the man who'd come with a long candle pole to light the gas mantle at his back. Now he sat almost in darkness, shadowed by the angle of the stair landing. 

Black John had not seen him yet. 

He would soon enough, however. He was approaching with his henchmen at his elbows. Mike tensed and put a hand on the broken chair leg, ready to yank it loose from under his trousers. None of the three men so much as glanced in his direction. Slowly he relaxed. 

This was no place for a meeting between them. A meeting would come, but at a time and in a manner of his own choosing, Mike told himself. He would demand his accounting from Bennett when and where he willed, not where destiny thrust it on him. He was no hot-tempered youngster to go off like a half-cocked pistol. 

The lights began to dim as the bar waiters went around to the wall fixtures. A piano sounded a few bars and the room grew still. The music was lively and gay; probably French, thought Gannon. 

Heavy maroon drapes swept back, revealing the painted backdrop of a Parisian street with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The piano quickened its tempo and a line of girls came prancing out onto the boards. They wore short red skirts with tightly fitted bodices and high black silk stockings with red pumps. Gannon guessed they were supposed to be from Paris. A sign on an easel on a corner of the stage read The French Can-Can. 

Silken legs flashed up in a high kick. 

The crowd roared at the sight of white thighs, black stockings and pink garters. The girls kicked again and again, and between times would balance on one leg and rotate the other at the knee. They wore lacy white panties. Even Captain Gannon stared, not quite remembering the last time he'd seen so many female limbs. 

The girls kicked and cavorted, laughing at the excited yells that greeted their every display, their faces flushed and eyes bright above heavily painted lips. Their shoulders were bare, as were their arms. Gannon thought them a good cut above the usual performers Canal Street offered. 

Evidently Black John Bennett did, too. He stirred and muttered, "Me, I'd take the blonde on this end if I was to have a choice." 

"Why don't you, sir? We'll give you a hand,” said one 

"Who's to stop us?” rumbled the other. "A crowd of bums and a couple of toffs from north of the Terrace? You take your blonde. I'll grab that little redhead. Toad here can take whoever catches his eye. We'll take them to the rooms over Shaughnessy's Bar." 

Black John needed little persuasion. He thrust back his chair and got to his feet. As he did so, Mike Gannon yanked out his broken chair leg. 

Gannon rose, the chair leg gripped in a big hand. He stepped around the table and swung. 

The chair leg hit the Irishman's thick skull and bounced, splitting. For a moment Black John stood erect, a shudder running through his broad back, then down into his legs. Then with a little sigh, he pitched forward on his face.

His companions had started toward the stage. Now they turned back, seeing Bennett sprawled across the table. Their eyes went to the smiling barge captain, widening with shock and disbelief. 

"Looks like he had too much to drink," Gannon said agreeably. "Better get him out of here fast.” 

Only the waiters had seen the by-play but they were moving away from the walls now, with the bung starters they always kept hidden in trouser pockets naked in their fists. The two bully-boys looked as if they might start swinging but Black John lay slumped unconscious at their feet. Without a leader, they were lost. They were used to following orders and no orders were forthcoming. 

One of them shrugged. “Come on, Toad. Let's get Bennett out. We can always settle matters with Gannon another time.” 

The men bent and lifted Bennett, carrying him under his armpits so that his heavy brogans dragged along the sawdust floor. Few men in the audience bothered to look away from the stage where the girls were now high-kicking more lustily than ever. 

Gannon sat down and reached for his glass. Even as he saw it was empty, a ringed hand replaced it with a full bottle of whiskey. 

"For a job well done, Captain,” smiled The Egyptian. 

She slipped into a nearby chair and leaned elbows on the tabletop. She nodded her head at the tables around them. "You saved me a lot of money by that prompt action. There'd have been a beautiful free-for-all if you hadn't. I keep twenty waiters here for trouble like that but it's hard to prevent it from getting started. Once it starts the place gets wrecked. I've had to redecorate five times in the last three years.” She made a face. "It costs money, a lot of money, to redecorate on Canal Street. Not many carpenters and painters are willing to work down here." 

“Forget what I did,” he told her, pouring for her and for himself. "I had to break a chair to do it.” 

"I'll bill Black John for that. He'll pay me, too, next time he's in here and sober.” 

"I'm Irish myself,” grinned Mike, "but Black John's a disgrace to the race. I'll bet a cookie he's from Ulster.” 

She laughed and swallowed. Mike let his eye touch her soft throat and lower to the crease between her large breasts.

"You said to tell you," he grinned, putting a palm to her upper thigh so the clasp of her garter was under his fingers. "I'm admitting it now. I want you. I never thought I'd want any other woman but Moira Kennally, but she's been married five years and five years can be the devil of a long time for a healthy man, believe me." 

"Wait just a little while," she whispered, leaning closer to touch his hand with hers, smiling roguishly. "I count my receipts at one o'clock. You can help me." 

When she thrust the bottle at him he pushed it away with a wry grin. "When I'm drinking I don't want a woman near me. When I'm wenching I hate the sight of a bottle." 

Her hand closed on his fingers, held them tightly. The brilliance of her eyes under their blued lids sent a glow throughout his body. 

They talked in low tones while the stage offered its girl dancers and singers. Three aproned waiters sang The Charming Young Widow I Met on the Train, while a pretty redhead as the widow, and a brunette beauty as the gullible traveler, pantomimed the verses. A roar of delight went up while the redheaded widow neatly removed the traveler's watch and chain and somehow caused the trousers to fall, revealing the brunette beauty in silk stockings and trans parent under-drawers 

Mike Gannon and The Egyptian heard little of what went on around them. He had started the dusky woman to talking about her early life and paid her the compliment of silence, 

"My mother was a cook on a canal barge. Mother Casey rented her out to the captains. Somewhere along the Erie I was conceived. I never knew who my father was, except that he was a canawler. Maybe my mother didn't know, either. She was rented out to a lot of them, she told me. 

“She died of tuberculosis when I was eleven. Mother Casey brought me up. When I was fifteen she rented me out, too, but I wasn't having any of the kind of life my mother led, thank you. I saved my money. I bought into The Mummy Case when Otis Coleman owned it. They called it The Coal Scuttle then." 

Her smooth shoulders lifted in a casual shrug. "One day a drunk came in and began shooting up the place. Otis tried to take his gun away and got a bullet in his middle for his pains. He died in my arms over there at the end of the bar. 

"The police came at the run at the first shot. They caught the drunk as he ran out onto the cobblestones and hustled him off in the paddy wagon to the Franklin Avenue police station. They hung him a year later. Nobody ever found out why he did it. Maybe he was just crazy from cheap rotgut booze. 

"Anyway, I suppose you'd say he did me a favor. Maybe he did. There was nobody but me to take over The Coal Scuttle. I redecorated it, called it The Mummy Case, added the Egyptian motif, called myself The Egyptian." 

"What's your real name?" he wondered. 

Her pouting mouth twisted into a smile. "Does it make any difference? I'm just an illusion, a way to make a man forget." 

She rose to her feet, stood swaying, looking down at him. His eyes ran over the swell of her thighs against the tight piqué, up around the gentle mound of belly to the jutting breasts. Her mouth was curving almost tenderly as she whispered down at him. 

"Come along, Captain. I know a lot of ways to rub out a man's memory. Treat me real good and maybe I'll use a few of them on you." 

Mike Gannon went after her swinging hips, past the tables crowded with men, into a smaller room fitted with a roll-top desk and a chair, a small table heavy with books and a wooden file cabinet. Half a dozen canvas money sacks had been thrown on the desk, beyond which was a squat Corbin safe. 

The Egyptian gestured casually. "Make yourself at home, Captain. There are cigars in the humidor. I won't be long." 

Mike struck a match, holding it to the Corona clamped between his teeth, studying the woman as she bent above the sacks, upending them, flooding the roll-top desk with bills and coins. She reached for a ledger. She was competent and efficient when it came to money, he saw. No tomfoolery about her then, and no awareness of her ripe body. 

He blew smoke, enjoying the rich taste of the Havana tobacco, hearing only the scratching of the pen with which she made her entries and notations. He was a little surprised at the amount of money she was counting. He'd thought he owned a flourishing business along the canal; it was peanuts compared to the revenue of The Mummy Case. 

"I'm in the wrong line," he told her with a chuckle. 

Her smile was preoccupied. "Men will always pay hard cash for a good time, Captain. I furnish the good time, they furnish the cash.” 

She made two more notations, then threw down the pen. 

"There! I'm done.” Her bare arms lifted high above her head as she wriggled her fingers and then interlocked them, smiling with sultry invitation at the canawler. There was a faint hair stubble in her armpits, which he found more stimulating than shaven skin. 

He tossed aside the cigar and took a long step forward. His hands went to her slim waist, lifting her up out of the chair, bringing her against him. Her mouth was soft and loose, taking his kiss with an honest hunger. 

The barge captain slid his palms down her back to her hips, holding her firmly until he felt her bare arms about his neck, clinging fiercely. Against his lips she whispered, "It hasn't been five years for me, Mike Gannon, but it wasn't yesterday, either." 

“Where?” he asked hoarsely. 

“The back door. There's a private stairway walled off from the rest of the house. I use it sometimes to work late at night, when I don't want to dress up." 

He carried her with one arm over her soft thighs and with her rump resting on a shoulder, listening to her laughter as she ducked when he opened the back-stairs door so they could go under the lintel. He carried her up the stairs and along a narrow corridor. 

She reached down and turned a brass knob. 

The room before them was heavy with Victorian furniture. Lace antimacassars covered the arms and backs of overstuffed chairs and sofa. A beaded curtain shut off a bed room from the reading room into which he carried her, to deposit her, with a revelation of shapely stockinged legs, on the wide Belter sofa. 

An ormolu clock stood on the marble mantelpiece, flanked by a copy of the bronze statue of Salammbo by Jerome and a bronze replica of Stephan Sinding's Kiss of Adoration. A thick Turkish carpet was underfoot, and close to the white ceiling an ornately carved and gilded cornice was hung with a scalloped fabric called swag. The drapes were tied back with silken ropes and over-sized tassels. Captain Gannon stared around him a moment. 

"You do yourself proud,” he murmured wryly. "I've not seen a better decorated drawing room in any of the houses I've been in, all along The Big Ditch." 

The Egyptian stretched, writhing her legs and hips on the edge of the couch as he stared at her. “I like nice things. I don't mind paying for them. When I was a little girl and saw my mother go off to cook and such for some bearded barge captain, leaving me to a bare, unheated room with only broken furniture and not enough covers on the bed at night, I swore I'd have plenty of everything when I grew up. And I have.” 

She held up her hands, let him pull her to a sitting position. Even while he stood staring, her fingers went to the hairpins and combs in her thick brown hair, tugging them free, loosening the thick strands so that her hair fell loose and dangling over her shoulders. 

The Egyptian turned her back, sitting on the edge of the sofa, knees close together. "Unfasten me, darling. I sent Poppy home two hours ago. Poppy's my maid." 

Mike chuckled as he undid a hook and eye, and then another. "You were mighty confident of me, weren't you? Well, you have reason to be. You're a damned attractive woman." 

His mouth touched her shoulder where it met her throat, finding it warm and smooth. His lips ran down her bared back to the edge of her short black corselet. In front, her hands held the piqué bodice to her otherwise naked breasts. 

“Anxious, Mike?” she whispered. 

His hands slipped under the bodice to hold her heavy breasts. At the touch of the sleek, soft flesh, his breath caught in his throat. "As anxious as a schoolboy. Now stand up like a good girl and step out of that fine gown you're only half wearing." 

The Egyptian laughed softly and twisted free of him. Impishness mixed with sensuality in her face as she took a few steps away from the sofa where he sat. The gown was falling from her shoulders where the long brown hair hung so thickly. One side of it was held in a hand, exposing her leg from bared thigh down the length of her stockinged leg to a red evening pump. She looked very much the eager, sensual woman to Captain Gannon at the moment. 

He found himself in no mood to play games. An excitement was geysering inside him, fed by the sight of this half-undressed woman posing so teasingly before him, playing him like a fisherman with a trout. Well, by God! No woman could treat him so! 

His hand stabbed out to hook behind a stockinged knee, pulling her off balance so that she fell forward, squealing in surprise. Then she was on top of him in her perfumed laces and satins and he felt the pressure of a bare shoulder against his mouth even as his palm stroked upward along her thigh. 

When she opened her mouth to protest he turned her so that she lay half on and half off the divan, and then he kissed her, driving his lips onto hers, mashing them open to accept the entry of his tongue. Her fist swung against his shoulder but he never felt it. It was good to have woman flesh in his arms again, crushed helpless to his muscles. His hand moved along her inner thigh and he felt her body go tense, then loosen as a low moan grew in her throat. 

The arms that had fought him closed around him. She arched herself upward with both high-buttoned shoes planted firmly on the carpet, urging her hips toward him. With his left hand he tore at the black corselet, stripping it down and away from her breasts. 

For an instant he stared at those firm mounds studded with rigid scarlet nipples, then his head was bending and his lips went searching. He could hear the hiss of her indrawn breath, the crooning voice that whispered words at him, urging him on, whipping his senses with panted obscenities. 

"Take me, Mike. This way, here on the couch. Later maybe we'll use the bed but right now—" 

He did what she asked and what he wanted to do, brutally and like an animal, but his very animality was an excitation that whipped her to a frenzy. She screamed thinly in his ear again and again before her teeth closed on his shoulder. 

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