Chapter 1: "Set in Stone"
Alli sat on a soft padded stool in front of her makeup mirror and sighed. She'd not slept very much for a couple of nights, now, and the decision she had finally made after years of denial had been, to her great surprise, one of the easiest things she'd ever done. Her stomach fluttered as she pursed her lips and frowned slightly in determination. Her intuition and her heart told her she was doing the right thing, but 10 years of shame and embarrassment cried out in panic, begging her to stop. For better or for worse, her life was about to change, and she hoped with all heart that she was ready.
When Alli was 14 years old, she was helping her father change a fuel pump in his Ford flatbed truck. The local mechanic, whom Daddy was too cheap to hire, had told him that the easiest way to change the pump was to unfasten the big bolts that held the bed to the frame and tilt the bed up so that the pump could be taken out the top of the tank. Her Daddy had just gotten the side of the bed propped up with a board and was searching for a cinder block to stabilize the weight when Alli had walked into the barn.
Fascinated by all things mechanical, Alli knelt beside the pickup and put her hands on the frame. The motion dislodged the board, and when her father had run around the stalls and saw his daughter, she was holding what was left of her arms up in the air and staring at them with a puzzled expression on her lovely face. Just before she passed out, she'd looked at Jim Olsen and said, "I'm so sorry, Daddy!"
To make a long story short, the fact that Jim was more focused on saving his daughter's life than anything was commendable, but short-sighted. Between the time the doctor at the small Georgia clinic asked Jim for the hands and the time he'd made it back to the farm in the Sherriff's howling police car, the farm dogs had made short work of the delicate presents they'd found on the floor of the milking barn. Jim Olsen returned to the clinic a defeated man.
Alli had come out of surgery several hours later minus her hands and several inches of her forearms. The board of the clinic had reckoned themselves lucky to get the young physician, and the success of Alli's surgery did nothing to dissuade them. As they healed, her stumps lost all traces of trauma save the hair-like suture lines the Doctor had placed so very carefully.
Every morning and every evening for eight years after that, Jim Olsen helped his daughter with her prosthetic hooks, and Alli valued her time with her father too much to tell him that she was far more than capable of dealing with her prosthetics herself, and could be in and out of her hooks in seconds.
There was no money for life-like hands; the farm demanded hard work from all its tenants, and Alli was expected to hold up her end of things, regardless of her handicap. Alli's mother was German, a taciturn, hard-working farm wife, and the sight of her daughter without her hooks offended her Teutonic sensibilities. She made it plain that Alli needed her industrial hooks to be productive, and insisted she wear them unless on her own, which was rare. The few times she had seen Alli without her hooks, she'd turned quickly away and told Alli to "Put herself together and get to work. The bills aren't going to pay themselves." Her answer to her daughter's developing breasts was tighter t-shirts and baggy clothing, which earned her jeers and merciless teasing from her peers at school.
With her father's help and her mother's ignorance, Alli excelled in school in spite of her conditions, and when she turned eighteen, she had already secretly graduated. Acceptance letters made their way to a post office box her father had procured for her in town, and a few days later, Jim Olsen put his only child on a bus to the University of Oregon, and went home to confront his wife.
Outraged that her husband would let her unpaid worker escape, Greta Olsen packed her meager belongings and bought a ticket for Munich, never to be seen again. Alli's father sold the farm and went to work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico after sending Alli an address and account number. When she inquired about the number, she was told that the account contained over three million dollars from the sale of the farm and surrounding land. Her father sent cards and letters for a few years, but by the time she graduated with a degree in computer design and engineering, the contact had ceased.
Alli had been working for a large electronics company in Portland for about a year when she met Sam.
San Enfield was a creature of habit. He always arose at the same time, did his workout in his home gym at the same time, and was in his studio carving by 8:00 in the morning. Sam carved in stone, mostly marble and granite, other stone by request. His was an ancient art; he carved gargoyles, grotesques and other medieval figurines for churches and collectors. One of a handful of master stonecarvers left in the world, he worked by commission and was booked out years in advance.
This day found him in Portland to meet an old client to look at drawings for another commission. The meeting had gone well, and before she left to return to her home in the Seattle area, the client had given Sam a hefty reserve fee and a first class ticket to Vermont to select stone with her the following week. As he sipped his coffee and made some changes to his website, he noticed a woman looking over his left shoulder from a seat just behind him. She was so intent that when she noticed him looking back at her with a half smile, she jumped and brought a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. Except that it wasn't a hand, it was a prosthetic hook. Sam's cock surged into an erection at the sight.
"I'm so sorry to peep over your shoulder! I was taken by the carvings in the pictures. Please forgive me, I should mind my own business," she said and looked down at her own laptop. Not content to let the special encounter stop there, Sam responded. "Do you like stone carving?"
