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Read by A. I. Stevens

CHAPTER ONE 

HENRY BAXTER frowned as the woman took off her clothes.

Ordinarily, he told himself morosely, he would have been over there beside her, to help her get that shift dress off, ready to begin the foreplay he liked to indulge in before taking a woman like Toni Croft.

He stood with hands deep in the pockets of his conservative suit; his frown turned into a scowl. He began to teeter back and forth on his toes, which was a habit formed long ago in the many board meetings he conducted for Lawson Industries, Incorporated, as a sign that he was damn worried.

A few hours from now he would be taking the biggest gamble of his life. It would mean a chance to crawl out from under the thumb of his wife, whose father had made Lawson Industries the biggest name in the electronics field. He ought to be in his office, not in this motel room. His attention should be on the papers to be signed, the phone calls to be made.

He would be taking a big risk. If things went wrong, he could go to jail. But if things went right, he would be sitting on a throne built by the amalgamation of Lawson Industries and Eastern Devices.

He wouldn't be under anyone's thumb, then.

The woman was pulling the dress over her head. Her pale white body, all smooth skin and perfumed flesh, showed itself to his eyes in a cobwebby brassiere that tried to hold in the quivering fullness of her large breasts and in black bikini panties stretched by her plump hips.

Henry Baxter found himself breathing faster. Damn! All Toni Croft had to do to get him worked up was to wriggle and twist as she pulled off her dress. Her big breasts bounced and wobbled, her thigh-flesh rippled, her buttocks shook.

He grinned tightly.

He wanted to forget his brother-in-law, John Lawson, and the job he had given him. He tried not to think about what might happen if Charley Brennan and Walter Harris got cold feet and blabbed all they knew to crusty old Ben Thayer. The sweat oozed on his forehead. If Thayer ever got wind of what was going to happen, there'd be a jail cell waiting for Henry Baxter.

His eyes touched his alligator attaché case. There would be no five-hundred-dollar attaché cases behind cell bars.

His hands clenched the keys in his left trouser pocket and the small change in the right. His jaw muscles hurt from gritting his teeth against his rash of nerves.

Enjoy yourself you idiot–nothing can go wrong.

You get this high on the ladder and it's always a big risk, no matter what you do. You aim for the moon and if you're smart enough, you hook onto a goddamn star that will make you one of the ten richest men in the country.

The woman turned her head to smile at him.

She saw his tenseness, the sweat on his forehead, and her eyes danced gleefully, thinking these were a compliment to her.

“You do love me, don't you, Hank?” she breathed.

“Of course I do. You know that. I've told you so enough. Stick with me, Toni–and I'll cover you with pearls and diamonds. Yes, and mink, too.”

She raised her bare arms and posed for him, making that funny little movement with her body that made her flesh ripple like a kootch dancer's. She spread her stockinged legs apart and bumped her pantied hips at him.

Henry began to lose interest in Lawson Industries.

He'd been a long time between women, and his manhood resented this abstinence. He didn't count his wife, of course. Louise had inherited Lawson Industries from her father, and was no more to him than a hand signing important papers.

Though, when he had a paper for her to sign, she could blackmail him into . . .

Toni Croft walked toward him.

Her lips were curved in the sultry smile that had immediately attracted his attention when he had first met her. She was a divorcée. She was also Ben Thayer's private secretary and earned close to twenty grand a year because she all but ran Eastern Devices.

It had been Toni who'd first put him wise to the fact that Charley Brennan and Walter Harris were ripe to bolt the solid-voting group at Eastern Devices. She had told him secrets about them that he had tucked away in his mental filing cabinet to be used on some future occasion.

Like in about one hundred hours from now.

Bare arms came up around his neck. An overripe red mouth smiled wantonly up at him. A pantied belly bumped his loins, found his straining flesh.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Toni whispered.

His hands came out of his pockets, slid to her bare sides and around behind her to move over her rounded buttocks. She had a goddamn gorgeous behind, this one. The way she was rubbing against him was exciting enough to make him boil over.

And that would never do.

He must perform like a regular Casanova today. It was part of his deal with Toni Croft. Without her knowledge of Eastern Devices, without her cooperation in setting up his coup he never could have gotten in the catbird seat.

“My thoughts are made of steam,” he grinned, putting his arms around her.

“Give me a steam bath.”

He bent his head to engulf her mouth with his open lips. She moved her head around, lips loose and wet. She knew how to kiss. She knew how to work a man up until he was all but climbing the walls. Her tongue slid into his mouth.

They touched tongues. There was no hurry, he had plenty of time. Things wouldn't begin to bubble on the front burner for a day or two. This was Thursday. This coming weekend he would get the signatures he needed. Plenty of time for fun, plenty.

His hands went down inside the panties. His fingers slid over buttock-flesh that was like white satin. Toni moaned, moving her hips faster.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“I'm going to treat you like the love goddess you are. Your breasts are marble madness, Toni. You have no idea what they do to me.”

“Don't I?”

She pushed free then and walked away from him. Toni Croft was a sweet witch, Henry thought. He grinned tightly and tossed his jacket across the room.

Toni sat down on the one easy chair in the room, crossed her legs, and reached for a cigarette, as she watched him undress. She liked his carelessness about his clothes before they bedded down. It made her think that she was all he had on his mind, that his desire for her was so great that nothing else mattered.

If she knew how torn he was between business and pleasure, she would not be smiling so slyly at him, puffing smoke and blowing it between her red lips. She would be damn near spitting and clawing at him like the cat she really was.

Not that she would ever know. He stood naked for her enjoyment. His manhood was ready–there was no greater compliment he could pay her than this evidence of her erotic effect on him. She sopped up carnal compliments like a blotter soaking in spilled ink.

Henry was proud of his lean, muscular body. Not bad for a man of thirty-seven. Handball at the club every other day, long hours at the gym, hunting trips to his lodge in the mountains, all kept him in shape.

No denying the beginnings of a paunch, though. But he liked to live well. The paunch would come off with a little dieting. Besides, it was really just a rounding out of his belly muscles.

Her slippered foot came up and her toe ran along his flesh. The leather scratched gently, making him shiver. His tongue ran around his lips.

He said softly, “I think I owe you something, Toni.”

Her words, when they came, were like sweet syrup. “What do you owe me, honey”

He knelt down before her and gently uncrossed her legs, spreading them apart. He leaned forward. His mouth opened and he bit–gently. Oh, so gently. Just nibbling, really.

Toni made a soft mewling sound as she moved against the chair-back The musk of her desire was in his nostrils now, driving him on. Never before with Toni Croft. But now, yes, because he needed her.

She was a big part of his plan. He must make sure of her, bind her to him, not only with promises of marriage after he divorced Louise, but right here and now, with the kind of amorous attentions he had never shown her before.

His fingers caught the sides of her bikini panties and tugged. She drew her knees together so he could ease the garment down. It slid to her upper thighs, showing a faint wisp of brown curls. He leaned and kissed the delicate tendrils.

She whimpered, putting her hands to his head. “Why, Hank? Why didn't you ever do this before? Oh God! If you knew how much I wanted you to, and how I was afraid even to hint about it.”

As the bikini came free of her ankles, Henry leaned to kiss her moist flesh. “I was afraid,” he whispered to her femininity. “Afraid? But why, darling? Why?”

He raised his face and thought irrelevantly that from her angle it must seem as though he had an auburn goatee. He said, “I've always wanted to, but just couldn't get up the nerve.”

Goddamn! It was the right approach. She had tears in her eyes and her mouth had lost that wanton look and was curving tenderly, maternally.

“You silly darling! Never mind, do it now, Hank. Oh, darling, we're going to be so happy together.”

Maybe, maybe not. He would have to think about remarrying when he had taken Lawson Industries from Louise and gotten Eastern Devices as well. When his plans ripened and he had become a major stockholder in both corporations, he might not be interested in Toni Croft anymore. He might even fire her, toss her out on her pretty little can.

For now, though, he devoted himself to her pleasure. Above him, Toni was making soft liquid cries.

In a way, this act gave him pleasure, too. He played a kind of make-believe, humbling himself before her. He, Henry Baxter, who would be a name to be reckoned with in American industry in another year or two, was on his knees before a woman who was just a pretty pawn to be moved in his game of corporate chess.

He didn't know how long he went on with his lip service, he was having too much fun with her privacy and his own thoughts. The chairman of the board kneeling to please her. The president of Lawson Industries her grovelling slave.

She didn't know he might fire her, once her usefulness was at an end. Henry Baxter laughed long, but silently, as he continued.

She reached the peak of pleasure again and again.

Only when she was a mindless thing, writhing helplessly in her passion, did he pull back and then lunge forward. Deep into her flesh he thrust and saw that she was nothing but a great demanding need in a soft white body.

He knew about women. He understood how to reduce them to moaning delight. He had made the study of women his own special province. In his eyes it was almost as important as the facts of corporate life.

Her legs locked about his hips.

She sawed away at him in a delirium of emotion, eyes closed, mouth open. What was it the Chinese said? Forty shallow, forty deep–was that the phrase? He tried it out, relishing her faint cries, the convulsions that shook her body.

Women were the mainspring of the business world. There were women in high places who badly needed to be bedded down, who knew secrets they would tell when you touched their honey-pots. Some women could even throw a lot of business your way. Other women knew men you had to meet.

Right now his brother-in-law was after women, beautiful women who would work on Charley Brennan and Walt Harris this coming weekend at his hunting lodge. Three girls, one for Brennan, one for Harris, one for him. None for Johnny, his right-hand man. Lawson Industries was not going to pay for John Lawson's pleasure. Let him find his own girls.

His concern over the proper hatching of his plans turned him into an amoral automaton. His mind was so preoccupied that his body was being governed by his brain and not his senses. He chuckled. Lucky Toni! She didn't realize why he was a sexual Samson. Enough for her to reap the benefits.

Next week he would be king of the hill.

So relax. Enjoy this the way it should be enjoyed. Let the business wait its turn.

As he studied her body, he saw it was going to flesh. At this moment it was at its ripest, its most exciting. In a few years . . . but forget that. He wouldn't even recognize her a few years from now.

Henry realized now that he would never marry her. With this thought, pleasure swept over him like a tidal wave, rising higher and higher. As it flowed over him, he thought that there was nothing in the world but pleasure, and he was its prince.

ii

He woke to shadows in the motel room.

A woman lay beside him, faintly sighing in her sleep. Henry drew away from the damp grip of her thighs. He looked with mild interest at the body in the garter-belt and nylon stockings. Toni Croft. God dam, but she had been a devil awhile ago. He grinned wryly. Maybe the fact that he had been something of a demon himself had had something to do with that.

He eased off the bed, a glance at his wristwatch telling him it was almost five in the afternoon. Soon it would be getting dark outside. Time to get the hell out of there.

He moved toward the bathroom to take a shower, at ease in his satiation. The warm water and soap cleansed his flesh and revived him. One advantage of being the boss-man of a corporation was he didn't have to account for his time.

His big brown hands toweled his flesh dry.

He felt a little like a gladiator girding himself for the coming battle. Now that he had rid his body of its tensions, he was ready to complete the deal that would put Eastern Devices in his hip pocket.

His hand slapped his slight paunch. Nothing like a bedding down with an attractive woman to clear the mental decks for action. He stared at his face in the bathroom mirror. He needed a shave.

The hell with that. The hell with everything but the deal. He was going to be a big man, a really big man.

When he came out of the bathroom, Toni Croft was resting against the pillows and smiling at him with genuine affection.

“Honey, don't go,” she crooned.

The trouble with women was they never knew when to let go. Maybe he shouldn't have gone all out this afternoon. He hated scenes.

“You know I'd give an arm to lie down there with you,” he told her with a grin. “But I have to get going.”

She pouted, “You aren't going back to the office. And your wife doesn't care when you get home. At least that's what you always tell me.”

“Appearances, my love. Right now I can't take a chance on anything fouling up our deal.”

She regarded him soulfully. “Hank, you know I love you, don't you? I've always loved you. But after today, I—I think I worship you.”

He slipped into his shorts, then his shirt. His trousers were only slightly wrinkled, he noticed. Looking in the mirror while fixing his tie, he saw Toni staring at him.

“When we get married, you'll forget you ever said that,” he answered in a bantering tone. He wanted to keep her certain of him–at least until the deal was complete.

“Oh, Hank, stop teasing,” she told him.

He turned and blew her a kiss. “You just lie there and think about our wedding, where we'll go on our honeymoon.”

Fully dressed, he came to the side of the bed.

She gave him her cheek, knowing he would not desire further intimacies.

From the doorway, he blew her a second kiss. He said, “Stay as long as you like. I only wish I could stay and have dinner with you. But that will come.”

Liar! he told himself.

His step was jaunty as he walked to the car.