Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page B

sheets in the green silk chemise he'd bought her for her birthday. The chemise was scooped low in front and slim-strapped and plunging in back. Soft and smooth. His wife liked pretty things and he liked to give them to her. Her body had come back quickly after the baby. She hadn't worked at it. Some women had the genes, she said. They were lucky.
    She was lucky.
    Of course she was.
    Her nipples were swollen from the baby's sucking and they had changed in color from a pale to a very much darker brown but that and a certain softening of the flesh, a certain overall voluptuousness, were the only major changes in her. She was still that woman whom all the men would want and all the women would want to know.
    The softness only made her more attractive to him. He wanted to touch it, grasp it, almost all the time now.
    He'd showered long and thoroughly, the water as hot as he could take it.
    He was shaving for the second time that day and glancing at her over his shoulder in the clouded mirror.
    Inside the boxer shorts his prick was hard already.
    What he'd always taken elsewhere he was beginning to want more and more at home now.
    It was funny.
    Maybe he'd logged in too many miles on the car, traveled too many roads to too many places. On "business trips" to collect "supplies and equipment" for the restaurant or interviewing "potential business partners" who never quite came around to investing. Happily she didn't ask many questions.
    But maybe he was getting tired of that.
    Or maybe it was the baby. His baby. The thing he'd put inside her that had grown there and now claimed her attention utterly. The fact of that which excited him. The challenge to take her back.
    Or maybe it was the softness of the flesh.
    Whatever. It was time to show her.
    Just a little .
    He'd been patient. Amazingly so.
    And she was ready. She wouldn't deny him.
    The baby, Robert, made her happy. At least that was what she told him. And he couldn't see any reason to disbelieve her. Though it was hard to understand. It seemed to him that Robert was all demands. He cried. He wanted feeding or fresh diapers or to be held. What he wanted, he got.
    He could understand that much at least.
    But the point was that she was happy with the baby and consequently happy, he felt, with him. With life in general. Which meant it was time he showed her.
    Just a little.
    He splashed water on his face and toweled off and checked his upper torso in the mirror. Small pouches at his hips but not too bad, the rest of him still tight and young and strong.
    He walked to the bed and stood over her.
    "What's the book?"
    "Novel." She showed him the cover. He pretended to be interested in the book. Something called Hero Jesse by Laurence Millman . He hated novels.
    "It's about this retarded boy," she said, "or maybe he's insane, I don't really know yet, but he romanticizes the Vietnam War because his brother's over there and ..."
    "Any good?"
    "Yes. Very."
    He sat down next to her on the bed and rested his hand on her hip. He smiled.
    "Okay. How good?"
    She smiled back. She was flirting with him. She knew what he was after.
    Or thought she did.
    "I told you. Very good."
    She went back to the book. And now she too was just pretending.
    He moved his hand down over her hip beyond the silk to the soft-hard flesh of her thigh. He squeezed gently. She looked up at him still smiling and glanced across the room to the baby sleeping soundlessly in his crib and then she marked and closed the book.
    "Okay, what?" she whispered.
    "What?"
    "Yes, what?"
    "This."
    His hand moved over and around her thigh and up to her ass and he cupped her cheek and pulled her toward him and kissed her, smelling her light perfume and his own fresh cologne. She put down the book and wrapped her arms around his neck so that he could feel her nipples hard already through the sheer jade silk. He slid the straps down over her shoulders and began to touch her, brushing the nipples side to side, up and down. She closed her