Victoria Spires woke to a sound, something just below her range of conscious hearing but still very real. There it was again, a sort of rustling accompanied by an almost indistinguishable creak as if someone had stepped on an old and whiny floorboard. Except there were no wooden floors in their home. They had an alarm system with ADT but nothing had triggered it.
With that sensation that something needed looking into she leaned over and quietly woke Jack. She knew she could count on him to be conscious and ready to act simply because she had seen him do it so often back when he was in Army special operations. As she anticipated he made the jump from sleep to wakefulness in a heartbeat, thanking in her in a whisper for her concern as he reached for the .40 Smith & Wesson pistol attached to the underside of the bed frame.
Victoria would be all right, he knew, because of both her courage and the five-round Taurus revolver she kept in her bedside table. It was compact but more than enough to defend herself with its load of .38 Special +P semi-jacketed hollow points. And she knew how to use it. Jack's imediate concern was not for his wife; it was for their two children.
As he moved through the dark house lit only be the faint glow from various digital readouts on clocks and appliances Jack mulled over just how someone might have bypassed the alarm system. His pistol, a stainless steel Model 4006, carried a full magazine of 11 rounds and he always loaded an additional round in the chamber since the weapon had a thumb-operated safety. He had slid off the safety before he ever got out of bed.
He and Victoria had two children, six-year-old Brandon with the beautiful black locks and his equally brunette sister, Morgan, who at five made up for her one-year junior status with an irrepressible humor and a determination to ask "Why?" endlessly. Jack recalled that Theodore Roosevelt was reputed by secretaries who took the trouble to count them to have often laughed three hundred times a day. He was convinced that Morgan asked "Why?" no less than that remarkable president had laughed.
Odd what you think on the way to someone else's funeral, he considered grimly as he threaded his silent way through the kitchen and into the back entrance to the hallway leading to the children's rooms.
The vicious blow to the back of his head and a simultaneous kick to the side of his right leg took him to his knees, generating a universe of stars all inside his brain. As he struggled to rise, fighting a curtain of darkness, he lifted the pistol up and back, pointing the muzzle directly over his shoulder, intending to fire it upside down. A second hammer to his head put him out. His weapon clattered to the floor and skidded under a small table in the hall.
Half an hour later Jack awoke with a splitting headache, a throbbing knee where he had been kicked, and blinded by lights. The first thing he saw was a police officer; the first thing he heard was his wife weeping. He struggled to re-enter the world of the living as a detective helped him up and to a couch. The man waited courteously while Jack regained his bearings. A solicitous and very professional female officer held on to Victoria as she collapsed in her grief.
"Mr. Spires, I am detective Randy Marks. I am sorry to have to tell you that your son, Brandon, has been taken. We have already issued an Amber Alert and I trust we'll receive word shortly. Right now I need to talk with you about whatever details you can give me."
The Spires never saw their small son again. Grief matured sadly into resignation. Resignation gradually became a collage of distant memories, and the memories were eventually wallpapered over by life itself.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Roger Stokes, captain of the Scandinavian Cruise Lines' Caribbean Sun surveyed his realm of her bridge. He then nodded as his officer of the deck informed him that the pilot was standing by to board for steerage into the Port of Phillipsburg, Sint Maartens, the Dutch or southern half of the large West Indies island known generally as Saint Martins.
With a smile at his junior officer of the deck, he said, "Mr. Zeigler, you have the conn. The pilot will be on the bridge shortly to take us in and three tugs will berth us in our usual place. Call me if you need me...I'm outside."
With those few orders he set in motion all the activities of the great white ship for the next hour. Already he sensed a stir among the passengers as they prepared to depart the ship. He really enjoyed these calls at St. Martins or its Dutch name, Sint Maartens. Their time in port was sufficiently long for his crew and himself to enjoy time ashore on those fabulous white beaches.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
The young brunette with the shiny, shoulder-length black hair pulled her cabin door shut, waited for its solid click as the lock engaged, set her things down long enough to tie a quick ponytail and headed for the top level sun deck where nude sunbathing was the order of the day every day.
Morgan Spires was an attractive barely-eighteen-year-old with a slender face, large brown eyes, and a wide mouth that seemed to be always smiling. At five feet and five inches of height she was as tall as her mother with a slender build that was shapely rather than skinny. She had nice legs and enjoyed displaying them. She also had the genetic gift of lovely breasts that exceeded her mother's, warranting museum exhibition.
She shifted the bag with her sunscreen and Dean Koontz' paperback novel Lightning to her left hand and gazed down at her chest, most of which was struggling valiantly to escape the tiny top. They were firm for their size, were large enough to be visible from behind when she raised her arms, and trembled as if they were mounds of honey-hued yogurt.
Her Sassy Fox bikini, a new offering from Prism Designs, concealed absolutely nothing top and bottom, though she wore a terry cloth micro-mini wrap about her waist until she entered the sun deck above. What there was of the poor little bikini thing certainly did not even begin to cover her large dark nipples. Her bottom was actually nothing more than a vee-shaped bit of lycra that covered the lower part of a vertical belt of dense black fur above her cleft, sank into her pussy to reveal her lips, and provided a tiny string that softly crossed her anus and attached behind to the thong's belt above her delicious hard little ass.
Morgan never thought a lot about her breasts when growing up, though her buds appeared at eight and swelled steadily and enthusiastically since that time. At her young age they were simply there and she accepted them as normal. In fact, her expanding chest was anything but ordinary. At one point when Jack and Victoria were hosting a New Year's Eve dinner a close friend of Victoria's asked during a lull in the conversation, "Well, dear, when do you think you'll do something about...umm...how shall I say this... do you plan to do anything about the size of her breasts?"
Victoria searched for words with which to respond; Jack, on the other hand, saw an opening and in fine form slid into it.
