Terran Times 18 - Emerald Envisage (46 page)

She tsk-tsked again. “There you go again with all your misconceptions. Sad to say, me boyo, I’m not fabulously anything.”

Clancy wanted to argue with that. His jumping, straining prick definitely wanted to argue with that! Stabbing wildly, lunging at everything and nothing, his prick was making a complete fool of itself. A complete and increasingly frustrated nuisance.

The woman was loony. She had to be.

Briefly his mind fluttered out of the store and over a few blocks. To the big public Mental Health Pavilion where quite a few of the more seriously deranged and deluded local loonys resided.

Did she escape?

He felt a sharp darting of fear.
Is anybody from the Pavilion looking for her yet?

“I’ve been trapped in that accursed cold-storage since last night,” she said, seeming to bear out the whole loony idea. Then, as if to deliberately drive him crazy by antagonizing what little was left of his self-control, she bent to retrieve his forgotten gallon of pistachio ice cream.

Clancy gulped, his throat painfully constricted as his heart leaped straight up and into it. For the moment he was completely occupied watching her move. Waiting for something to fall out of her green costume-thing.

Sadly, nothing did.

How the hell does she do that?
Clancy could only clutch at himself again. Harder. So hard that if he hadn’t been so overloaded already with agony that even a direct hit from an AK-47 wouldn’t make, he’d have screamed for sure.

“I was being pursued.” Very matter-of-factly, the blonde opened the door and returned the ice cream to the freezer. “By a dog. Terrible creatures, dogs. I don’t like them. And this one certainly didn’t seem to like
me
.”

Play along. Keep her calm. Don’t give her any reason to…

“As I was running for my life, the name of this place caught my attention.” She really seemed to believe what she was saying.
But then, don’t they all? All the loonys?
“Emerald Aisles. I thought nothing could be more propitious. Nothing could be safer for one of my…persuasion. Only the damn-fool beast chased me right inside. Nipping at my heels all the way. Until finally I had to leap into the first refuge I found.”

“The freezer case.” Clancy glanced around.
No men in white coats. Not a one in sight. Where the hell are they? Don’t they keep count of their…inmates? Don’t they even try to keep track of them?

She nodded. “And there I was. Trapped. So I had to make myself invisible to get the beast to go away. And so I wouldn’t cause an uproar until some good soul came along and opened the door. So I could slip out unnoticed.”

“Couldn’t you just…” Clancy wiggled his fingers in the direction of the staff she brandished like the deadliest of weapons. “You know. Zap the beast? Or something?”
What the hell is a mental patient doing with a big, heavy, deadly metal stick anyway?

The men in white coats better show up soon. Sooner.

Shaking her head again, the blonde looked at him as if he was the lunatic. As if he was the most pitiable creature on the planet. “That would be frivolous. One doesn’t squander magic on trivialities,” she informed him in a lofty tone.

“
Sorry.
And using your…errr, magic to let yourself out before you froze to death? Would that be considered…what did you call it? Trivial?”

“Frivolous. I said frivolous. And the whole thing’s not that simple. Saving myself from freezing wouldn’t have been frivolous at all. And I’d have done it if I could. Sadly, though, the magic doesn’t work when it’s contained. So I found myself trapped.”

“Contained.”

She nodded, and though she didn’t completely lose the look that said she thought
he
was the loony one, at least it lessened a little. A least it started to go away. “There has to be an opening,” she explained. “Of some kind. Otherwise the magic just goes around and around and does nothing. Except build up a charge that can be dangerous.”

Shit on a shingle.
Clancy barely heard the end of it. His prick had decided to steal all hearing…all reason and plain, common sense. He was actually starting to believe this cock-and-bull wackiness. And the other parts of his body…

Shit
. Was instantaneous compulsion possible? Was obsession that overrode every self-preservation mechanism with which he’d been endowed conceivable? He was starting to think so.

His knees started to bang together. His legs were just about unable to support him and he’d lost feeling in his extremities. All except the one. His prick started to twist, determined to screw thin air if that was the only thing it could find to screw. His head swam, his heart twitched and his gut alternately soared, then dropped with a strange series of ever more sickening crashes.

He was in bad shape. He almost did collapse in a heap. “You w…weren’t inv…visible,” he stammered. “I saw you.
See
you. Clearly.”

The blonde opened her lips. Her tongue appeared to stroke them and it wasn’t green in any way. It was soft. Pink. And with it came a calculatedly wicked sparkle in her green eyes. For the most split of seconds, she took on her greenish hue again and Clancy…

I’m gut-shot.
He had to be. Already reasonless, his prick decided that was the single most erotic thing the blonde had done yet. The thing it liked most of all the things she had done.

It screamed and Clancy whimpered. It tried to throw him bodily to the floor and he did his damnedest to resist.

“You see me,” she breathed around the succulent enticement of that tongue, “because I decided it would pleasure me to have you see.”

“Pl…pl…pl…pl…”

Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, Christ.
Pleasure. Now,
that
was a word!

“I decided to thank you.” Her eyes glowed. Unearthly-glowed. In a way that terrified the shit out of him in ways even
Joyce
had never been able to terrify the shit out of him when
she
started to glow.

Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, Christ.

“Th…th…th…th…” He was at it again. Witless and wordless, stuttering and stammering as a woman so delectable and desirable his mind could hardly accept her existence closed in on him.

Instinctively, Clancy backed off a step. Fighting death-daring urges and surges of a lower body tormented beyond human endurance. But of course his body had other notions. His body kept goading him. Nagging at him, trying to trick him into stepping forward instead. Straight into the danger that gleamed unmistakably in the ice-cream-freezer blonde’s eyes. “D…do you h…have a name?” he asked. Buying time.
I hope
.

“Gaelle,” she replied, becoming a coquette upon utterance of the word. Entirely a coquette, her voice dropping to a lower register and softening in the same way her features softened. With sudden, sultry allure. And her body…

Jesus God, her body!

Clancy tried to swallow a lump in his throat that threatened to cut off the very last of his air supply and his consciousness.

Her body undulated. Seeming at times made more of vaporous green suggestion than any actual flesh or blood, her body wavered. Oddly. In and out of focus. It gleamed again, too, with that strange, gemlike light he’d seen before. And the purple stone topping her staff did the same.

Glowed
.

It shone from deep within. Shone with a sudden, orchid vibrance that stemmed from its deepest internal facets. It was a strange light. A subtle, yet oddly all-illuminating gleam that somehow never reached its surface. Never even came
close
to reaching its surface.

Fascinated, Clancy watched helpless as first the shimmering stone, then the blonde’s entire body exuded wave upon wave upon searing
wave
of sensuality.
Sex
uality.

The blonde…Gaelle…moved again. Toward him.

Clancy’s feet were more rooted to the spot than ever. But not his heart. Oh, no. Far from it. His heart raged. It rampaged. Enraged by its captivity within his rib cage, it pounded and thundered. Demanding freedom. As did the other beast he held trapped…the one between his legs, the one he cupped almost tenderly inside the curves of hands that had gone still. Hands that forgot to massage in the sudden, soaring, searing heat of a moment he knew instinctively he was never going to forget.

Neither heart, nor prick, nor distended, overextended balls seemed exactly agreeable to movement at that moment. Full of itself and full of what itself had to offer in another minute or two, his prick was in a mood simply to act in its own best interest. Or maybe it was better to say it was ready to
re
act. Doing its damnedest to drag him groin first into situations and places he might not necessarily be ready to go.

One last time, very feebly now and half-heartedly, Clancy tried to remind himself that the woman quite possibly, very probably, was an escapee from the Mental Health Pavilion.

That hardly seemed to matter though.

Because he
was
ready. Unable to resist magic so strong, magic that in the blink of an eye he accepted unquestioningly
as
magic, he licked his lips. Once. Almost furtively. “What did you have in mind?” he asked as, steeling his gut for whatever answer she might give, he dragged in what very well might be his last breath and hung on again with all his strength.

Lunatic or leprechaun, Gaelle didn’t answer right away.

She smiled. And it was an enticing smile. Barely there, then almost immediately gone, it worked a magic far greater, far more potent, than if she’d just allowed the expression to light up her face…allowed it to reveal the white strength of her teeth and the vixen’s dimple Clancy felt sure must reside in one of her cheeks or the other.

He’d never
had
to have a woman so badly.

She sidled right in next to him, undulating with shoulders and breasts and hips. She sidled right up close to him and now his temperature soared. His pulse rate beat out a frantic new staccato rhythm, and when she took his hand in hers, he was a goner.

It was the first physical contact between them. And it was a lulu, singing living flesh with a potent form of electricity even stronger, even stranger than the emerald magic that still shimmered on and off in every inch of her. Clancy wanted to let go. Could
not
let go.

Silently, Gaelle led him. Firmly, as if she understood he was powerless to resist, powerless even to protest. As well he should be. Since she’d cast her spell upon him. Hadn’t she?

Past his abandoned grocery cart, she led him. And he had enough sense left, just barely enough, that the sight of its contents gave him a bad moment. Or two. Heads of lettuce, pale green and fresh. Deeper-hued fresh spinach and fifteen bags of matching pasta. A bright-lime blast of bunches and bunches of grapes. Selected for a party he knew somehow, on some level that lay below instinct, below reflex, he was never going to attend. A party that was going to be sadly lacking, because its major green components were never going to show up.

Joyce
is going to kill me.

Though his fiancée was nothing more than a fleeting memory at the moment, the part about the killing came through quite clearly.
Joyce
would be waiting at her place right now. Impatiently, as usual. She would be expecting him to bust his ass getting to the supermarket and then bust it twice as hard getting back to her, simply because she’d
ordered
it and her orders were to be followed implicitly. Without delay.

What was left of his mind could picture her standing at the front window, kitchen knife in hand. Peering through the curtains, a foot tapping in hot aggravation. And for the first time since he’d slipped the over-priced diamond she’d
ordered
onto her finger, Clancy felt a spurt of rebellion.

To
hell
with
Joyce
.

To hell with her high-and-mighty ways and to hell in a hand basket with him being constantly pussy-whipped! He was a man, Damnit. And it was high time he started acting like one.

With that fresh in his mind, it became easier to go with Gaelle. Easier to accept that he was going to go with her because it was what he really wanted. Because the power he felt dragging him irresistibly along wasn’t magic at all, wasn’t a spell or a hex or a charm. The power came from right inside himself.

It was the power of his own long-neglected will, declaring its freedom at last.

He smiled. And gave it all up. All memory of
Joyce
and groceries. Everything except the unexpected wickedness of this encounter with a woman who
couldn’t
be there. Yet somehow was. “Where are you taking me?” he inquired, no longer stammering and no longer stumbling as his strength flowed back. As his too long neglected independence of thought and action set their own course for the first time in the long, long, longest of times.

“I must show my appreciation. For the rescue.”

“You must? But how?”

“You seem favorably disposed.” Casting a quick glance back over her shoulder, Gaelle never broke the pace she set for them.