"There is no time!" Lagula insisted. "Please! Come at once!"
"Come on," I echoed to Ilona reluctantly.
"Just a minute." She crossed over to a closet and grabbed a dress from a hanger.
I followed her example and started for my clothes out on the balcony.
"No time to dress!" Lagula insisted, tugging at my arm and starting to push me towards the door.
"But I'm stark naked! I can't go out like this," I protested.
"Wait. There's a poncho here. You can wear that." Ilona reached into the closet and tossed me the slicker. It was the kind of thing both men and women wear in Africa during the rainy season.
Her dress was on over the shorts and halter but still unbuttoned as Lagula urged us out of the room. He led us down a back staircase, and we left the hotel by the delivery entrance. Lagula had a car waiting, and Ilona and I got in the back while he took the wheel. He pulled the car around to the front of the hotel.
We were just in time to observe the effect of the fate we had so narrowly missed. A man hopped nimbly down from the balcony just above Ilona's, tossed an object into her room, and kept going to the balcony beneath hers, where he threw himself flat on the flagstones. A moment later there was an explosion, and the contents of Ilona's room spewed out over the street. I caught a faint whiff of manure as the clothes I'd been wearing wafted by in fragments overhead. We all ducked instinctively, and when I raised my head, the man who had thrown the bomb had vanished. Lagula hit the gas pedal, and we too sped off in the wake of the explosion.
"I feel faint," Ilona said, grabbing at me with instinctive accuracy.
"So do I!" I told her, chopping at her wrist to make her loosen her grip. "What are you trying to do? Unman me?"
"Sorry." She eased up enough to allow the blood to circulate again. But she didn't let go. She seemed to find some sort of security in keeping her hold there.
"Was that T.U.M.S. again," I asked Lagula.
"Yes," he said, his nose, which just barely cleared the steering wheel, pressed to the windshield as he drove.
"You mean S.M.U.T.?" Ilona sounded shocked. But her emotions were all cross- circuited, and her response to the situation was a deliberately erotic tickling motion that sent a sexy shiver up my spine.
"Arrange the initials as you wish," Lagula shrugged. "It's all the same organization."
"But why should they try to kill me?" she asked, her hand starting to twitch frantically under the poncho I'd donned.
"It is Mr. Victor they want to kill," Lagula told her. "You just got in the way, and I imagine they consider you expendable."
"Oh, they do, do they?" Indignation made her squeeze hard again.
"Please," I moaned.
"Sorry!" She loosened her grip and patted me soothingly. "So I'm expendable, am I?" she muttered to herself. "Well, I'll show that dirty pig!" She released me and reached behind her back with both hands. The simple summer frock she'd grabbed before was still unbuttoned, and now she released the clasp of the halter she was wearing. She tossed it to the floor of the car and her breasts bobbled free, only half hidden by the loose material of the low-cut dress.
"What are you doing?" I exclaimed.
"Switching sides!" she told me with grim determination as she pulled her skirt up over her hips and unzipped her shorts. They fell to the floor with the halter as she pulled the skirt down again.
"But it isn't necessary to -" I started to say.
"I never do things halfway! If I'm going to betray Highman, I'm going to betray him in every sense!" Ilona took my hand, slipped it under her bodice, and pressed it hard against the straining of her breast.
"Highman? But what has he got to do with -?"
"Don't worry, I'm going to tell you." She reached under the poncho again and her hand slid down my belly. "I'm going to tell you everything. And I'm going to make love to you, too! That'll show that -!" Her legs began moving like feverish scissors.
"Aren't you being just a bit hypocritical?" I asked mildly. "After all, you were all set to make love before you had anything to get even with Highman about."
"That was different!" she insisted with typical feminine logic. "That was because you got me all excited when you came in smelling like that. That was because I couldn't control myself. It was strictly for my own pleasure, and it made me feel guilty. But this is for revenge, and I don't feel guilty at all." As if to drive home her point, she parted the folds of the poncho, straddled my lap, and neatly impaled herself.
"I see," I said, not seeing at all.
She stayed quite still for a while, thinking, her face reddening with obvious anger as she thought. I was somewhat torn myself. My natural instinct was to start moving like crazy, of course. But I didn't want to take a chance on sidetracking her from anything important she might be about to tell me about the S.M.U.T.-Nyet- Highman mishmosh. I noticed Lagula adjusting his rear-view mirror and realized we were putting on a show for him. I wondered just how much of a show we might be putting on for the rest of the traffic we were passing. It was considerable at the moment, and we were crawling along in a jam reminiscent of mid-Manhattan at theatre time. I decided the situation was ridiculous.
"Look, why don't we postpone this until later?" I suggested to Ilona. "And you can tell me what you know about Highman and the rest now."
"Are you rejecting me?" she asked indignantly. "Because if you are, I won't tell you a damn thing!"
"Tact, Mr. Victor," Lagula murmured from the front seat. "Hell hath no fury like a lady scorned. But be sure it is Highman's scorn which remains uppermost in her mind."
"Of course I'm not rejecting you," I assured Ilona soothingly. I bounced a bit to prove my enthusiasm.
"Ahh!" she responded, bouncing right along with me. "Well then, let me start at the beginning." She nuzzled my lips with her breast, and I opened them to receive it. "I was seventeen years old when I first met Peter Highman." Her womanhood continued to clutch at me thythmically as she spoke. "That was two years ago and -"
"What's going on here?" A voice at the top of the side window of the car interrupted her.
I looked up. Lagula had been forced to stop the car at an intersection. And now a Salisbury traffic cop was peering into the back.
"It's all right officer," Lagula said quickly. "The gentleman and the lady are engaged. She is merely sitting on his lap to see better out the back window."
"Yes," Ilona agreed without missing one twitching movement under the cover provided by her skirt. "Is there a law against sitting on my fiance's lap? If not, then wy are you bothering us?"
"Sorry." The cop touched his cap apologetically and moved away.
Our car began inching again as Ilona resumed her story. "At that time, two years ago," she said, digging her nails into the back of my neck and slamming down on my thighs with each frantic downstroke of her passion, "I was oversexed. Now, you may find that hard to believe, but I really was."
"I don't find it hard to believe," I panted, straining to keep up with her.
"At least Peter Highman said I was oversexed," she said, enveloping me with ripple after ripple of her sudden climax, "and I believed him."
"Few are the things upon which he and I might agree," I grunted, keeping a firm grip on her hips so that she wouldn't bounce right through the roof. "But -"
"Yes, I believed him. Ahh! Ahh! Ooh! Aah! That was good! Now again!" She had subsided momentarily, but then she started again, moving in slow, churning circles. "After all, I was a simple farm girl in Hungary when he found me."
"How did he happen to find you?" I was biting hard on my lip and concentrating on the pain to keep from ending matters before Ilona finished her story. By now I had realized that it was sex which was making her so loquacious, and I couldn't risk turning her off.
"By sticking a pitchfork into a haystack. I was – umm – playing there with a field hand. That pitchfork stabbed me right in my bare sitter. I still have the scar. You want to see it?" Ilona was innovating now, rocking with a gentle motion that caressed the entire length of my manhood.