CHAPTER 1
Dodge Blueitt was independent and tended to ignore instructions to perform low-priority work. Beef rancher Sloan Silver would have fired him years ago except Dodge was the best worker he'd ever had.
The cheerful drifter had appeared eleven years back in rain asking for a meal and enough gas for his jalopy to get to the nearest town. Sloan's new wife and the kids had taken to the guy and his stories about working cattle and the adventures he'd had.
Sloan invited the drifter to stay the night and next morning, nudged by wife Ally, offered temporary work to the lean fair-haired guy to help castrate bull calves.
Over the next decade Dodge (real name Roger) introduced the Silver's two daughters to sex and gave embarrassed sexual instruction to the two sons.
The parents believed that information should not be imparted until kids turned twenty-one while accepting the kids would learn bits and pieces about sex well before they turned that age. And so at the required times the four kids found Dodge was a fountain of information about sex and the girls both asked for more and got it.
But the best was to come.
Ally was a fair-minded but uptight and always did her best for Dodge because he was... well because he was different... well she had this suppressed feeling for him. There was the occasion she was feeling poorly when he hung clothes for her on the outdoor line. He was dressed in jeans and boots and when he reached up to peg one of her bras, Ally saw his back muscles on his tanned back ripple and she went weak at the knees and flushed strawberry red.
Oh my.
Four years after his arrival Dodge was promoted to foreman and a bedroom in the house went with that position.
Dodge had pushed back his Stetson to scratch his forehead and said, "Sloan I'll feel more comfortable remaining in the bunkhouse with the boys."
"Sorry Dodge I can't allow that. It's part of my proven successful management to require the foreman to sleep at the house to give the boys room to let off steam and to slander their boss and the real boss and his missus."
Dodge said his piece. "We are here to manage the land and to manage the herd boss, not to play nurse to cowhands."
"Well Dodge, this is yet another of our conversations that will never end in agreement. Get on with your work."
"We're finished for the day."
"Oh yeah."
Ally, who was 37 at the time, was excited about Dodge coming to live in the house. They were about the same age and had at least one thing in common: she'd been born in Chicago and taken to live in North Florida when eleven and Dodge had been born and raised on a chicken farm less 90 miles out of Chicago. Ally, who was nine years younger than Sloan, couldn't understand why this Sloan excited her so.
Enlightenment came finally when Ally realized she no longer dressed with the door closed. The view from the doorway was straight to the dresser when she stood examining herself in the mirror, whether dressed or undressed.
"Omigod," she breathed. "I'm hoping he'll see me nude or near-nude.
By 'he' she meant Dodge of course.
It took days before Ally could bravely examine her feelings without restraint. She attributed her previously high standards of morality to being the daughter of a clergyman but, at the same time, was aware those imposed and self-imposed standards had eroded a little over the years.
So what did she want from Dodge?
Confused, Ally blocked out thinking on from there.
However, her patient and unrelenting descent toward adultery continued.
Ally began buying dresses that were a little shorter and exposed a little more than a suggestion of bosom swell. Any thought that she was beginning to show Dodge her breasts would have half-terrified her. Wearing shorter dresses with a lower neckline was achieved incrementally so her husband wouldn't notice unless his memory recall had improved. But it slowly dawned on her that Dodge might not be noticing such change either.
She began regularly asking Dodge to bring in the washing off the line.
Cheerfully he did that chore, not matter how hard his working day had been. Like Dodge in coming to this state, she'd been surprised to learn that Florida had beef cattle and astonished to find that almost half of the state's agriculture land was involved in cattle production and that Florida had four of the nation's ten largest cow-calf operations.
Since being promoted to foreman and pulling in more money, Dodge had purchased a previously owned pickup (a Dodge Ram of course) and some youngster bought his wheezing old pickup for peanuts. With improved transport, Dodge went home twice a year for Christmas and July the 4th. In Illinois even kin and old friends had expressed surprise there were cattle ranches in Florida. They tended to think of the state being populated by gangsters and hookers, having being raised in the TV series Miami Vice, oh and they knew the state received more than its fair share of tourists and retirees of course.
Ally Silver's next move in her pre-seduction crawl was hugely radical for her.
"I'm busy making pastry sweetie (yes about a year earlier she began calling Dodge sweetie whenever they were alone), do you mind picking out my underwear from the basket and placing it on my bed?"
Dodge scratched his left armpit.
"What about Sloan's underwear?"
"I iron it."
"What about Sloan's synthetic socks?"
"What about them?" she said bravely, not diverting her eyes and his gray eyes now eyed her suspiciously through narrowed lids.
"It's just what I want you to do Dodge. Please do it or don't bother."
She was shaking so much that she ought to have been whipping cream rather than rolling pastry.
"Why don't you buy ready-to-use pastry from the supermarket?"
"Because I love cooking, I feel I can express myself for cooking. Using supermarket pastry would leave me cold."
"Why, because it's frozen?"
She laughed wildly as if hearing the joke of the year, and holding on the bench with one hand and feeling a desire to open her legs, she began to panic. But the sight of him grinning that she'd appreciated his 'joke' quickly calmed her.
Later Ally found her underwear dumped in a heap on the bed and sighed.
But the next time after he delivered her personal washing, she found her underwear sorted into piles of bras, panties and panty hose.
Next time he took her pile of underwear to the bedroom she found the panty hose folded once, the panties folded once and arranged in colors, darkest on the bottom and whites on the top.
She concluded omigod, he was communicating with her that he knew what this dodge was about. She fell against wall with her legs spread and touched herself through her dress. She knew she only touched herself when she was horny, knowing that was how it was meant it be. She knew she now felt horny, very horny.
Ally usually only brought basic panties and bras but when next in town she purchased a fancy panty and bra set, patterned with plenty of lace. She came out of the bathroom wearing the set that night because she wanted Sloan to get used to seeing the upgrade in underwear, or lingerie as the store assistant kept calling it.
"God woman, you look sexy," Sloan said and throwing back the covers began working up an erection.
"I-I bought it to encourage you to have sex. I'm beginning to lose my great body shape."
And that was true and said with the intent of being appreciated.
"Come here Buttons and see what daddy has for you. I'll like any shape you care to be."
From that night their sex life returned to how it used to be, for quite sometime.
When Ally included those new panties and bra in the washing and Dodge had sorted and was now taking that und... er lingerie to the bedroom, she waited till she heard his bedroom door shut and raced to her bedroom.
"Omigod," she wheezed joyfully.
The new panties and new bra were on top of their respective piles. Dodge really was communicating.
A few days later the two men were in the kitchen having coffee before going off to a bull sale when Sloan said, "Damn, I've left my sunglasses in the barn."
"I'll fetch them for you."
"Thanks Dodge but I may need to retrace my steps to find them. They could be in half a dozen places."
He went off and Ally arrived from the bedrooms with a basket of linen and clothes for washing.
"More coffee sweetie?" she said, looking out and seeing her husband walking toward the barn.
"Yeah thanks."
After pouring the coffee she turned and looked back at the table and stopped. He'd pulled something out of the soiled laundry basked.
"Dodge, stop that. What on earth are you doing?"
"Smelling the crotch of your used panties, that's what I'm doing. What does that tell you?"
"You animal," she snapped, realizing she was blowing the best opportunity of her life. "Put down my panties and behave."
He stood, grabbed his hat and looked at her unsmilingly and calmly said, "Up yours."
Ally's legs were giving out. She sat and watched him leave and began weeping.
"Oh god, why do I have such difficulty acting like a slut?" she sobbed.
She knew the answer. She'd changed her behavior and modified her attitudes but there was still work to do. But alas she'd blown it and what the hell did up yours mean?"
As the men drove off and she'd waved to Sloan, the only one who'd waved, she suddenly had worked out what Dodge's gently rebuke meant. It meant shove your bad tempter or whatever up you butt or perhaps your vagina in the case of a woman.
She giggled.
There was nothing else she could do.
That day Ally sat out under the apple tree and really thought about her seduction of Sweetie. She'd not actually thought about it until now. Those other actions had been spontaneous albeit rational, but that this rate of snail-pace progress it could be five years before she had Sweetie, as he unwittingly called it, 'up hers'.
Did she actually want him 'up there'?
Oh yes, she practically panted and imaging the insertion she'd become very skilled at visualizing.
She touched herself and with her heat rising pulled up her dress and inserted a finger.
Ally heard someone cough lightly and looked up and saw Sloan walking forward her and looking at her intently.
Slowly she withdrew her hand and pulled her dress hem down a bit but left her legs open.
"Hi, we finished early," Sloan grinned. "The boys are preparing to go to town for a beer and Dodge has ridden out to check on the Messa Creek hay barn. He won't be back until dark. What would you like to do?"
"Let's have a bath together and then really do it in bed."
He grinned and said he thought she might be in that kind of mood but made no mention of what he'd observed.
The ranch operation included 440 mothering cows and kept Sloan and his foreman and two ranch hands busy. The ranch was located in the south-central county of Highlands and they got ranch supplies at either of two close towns. But once a month Ally, with or without Sloan, went to the Sebring, the county seat with a population of around 10,500.
On this occasion Ally summed up courage and purchased an adult DVD that, interestingly, had the title of Raunchy Alison. Ally was sure a porn star with such a lovely name would engage only mildly in exhibition sex or whatever it was called. Even so, after having lunch and then finishing shopping, she drove home as if the SUV had a live bomb aboard.
* * *
Half an hour after Ally had left the ranch, her youngest child Pru arrived unexpectedly. The twin boys were a year older than Pru and the oldest child Rebecca was ten months older than the twins.
Pru at nineteen, had married only three months earlier, a hastily arranged marriage but sadly she lost the fetus shortly after the wedding was arranged. Her husband Garth was a shy bank assistant manager, three years her senior.
Finding no one at home, Pru roped a horse and rode out to find someone. She wouldn't be too worried if she found no one because riding was in her blood.
Almost half a mile down the track she found Dodge and Larry had just finished swinging a new gate.
