No Controlling Legal Authority Ch. 28...

"Why, all of them, Your Honor," she giggled even more suggestively, swinging her bare foot back and forth, and she took a sip of scotch to give her lips something tangible to hold on to, but her eyes calmly studied his reaction with canny anticipation.

"All of them? You've been a busy girl, haven't you?" he joked uneasily, because his mind was already on a slippery slope.

"Well, maybe just all of the carnal ones; they're my specialty, you know." She was swinging her nude foot and purring like Mae West delivering the line, "Why don't you come up and see me some time, big boy," and the effect on Caleb was similar to what she might expect had she simply lifted her sweater and flashed her titties at him.

"My, my," he grinned salaciously. Beads of sweat were beginning to sprout on his forehead. "That is intriguing; I'm sure hearing about those sins would make for a very, very interesting trial, my dear."

He was leaning toward her, leering at her over the parapet of the bench like a peeping Tom at a bedroom window, and she could see his eyes tracking the motion of her leg. His fingers twirled the head of his gavel furiously, spinning the shaft inside his fist with such vigor that she half-expected to see smoke from the friction rising at any moment. She had brought him this far with seemingly innocent banter and deceptively casual poses, she reasoned, so she determined it was time to turn up the heat a notch to see how he would respond. This dangling of the double entendre in front of her quarry's nose to see if he would bite was the sort of prelude to foreplay that she found both thrilling and deliciously tantalizing. Tempt him with a notion that is at once both innocent and risqué and let him choose the direction he wishes to follow. It was an especially helpful tactic in the seduction of the timid, because it kept open the door open to innocuous escape should fear overcome the allure of titillation.

"Trials take too long, I think, so I'll spare you the bother; I'll just plead guilty," she laughed with a throaty, seductive chuckle, and she drew back her shoulders, testing the fortitude of her sweater. "I'll just throw myself on the mercy of the Court and hope for the best."

Poor Caleb, of course, hadn't a ghost of a chance nor a choice either, because when she punctuated her suggestion by thrusting her breasts toward him, all he really heard was something about throwing herself on him, and right then and there his libido took his rudder from him. From that point he couldn't have steered his responses toward innocence even if all his ancestors and the entire Holy family had been watching him from the front row of the spectators' gallery.

"Well," he began, trying to sound imperious with a voice that was on the verge of squeaking, "I don't know if throwing yourself on the Court's mercy is such a good trial strategy, you know? Maybe the Court's a little short of mercy just now and you should think of something, ah, more, ah, persuasive, before the Court passes sentence."

"Oh, gee, Sir, pass sentence? This is all so unfamiliar and strange; what's a poor girl to do?" she fretted, giving an unconvincing performance of apprehension. But then, even as she pretended to be flustered, she took heed of Coach Devito's advice to "See him and raise him one," and she continued, "Do you think I could get off quicker for good behavior?"

"Well, now, oh my, 'get off for good behavior?'" he puffed, rocking back on his heels, as it were, like he had just been handed an opinion that reversed one of his proudest judicial accomplishments.

She glanced down at her lap demurely, excusing him for the moment to fashion his response without the added burden of her scrutiny, and, while her head was bowed, she suddenly lifted her hem as though she had noticed on her skirt a blemish the size of Nebraska that required a closer inspection.

The rusted springs supporting his ancient chair shrieked in protest as he lunged back and forth and side to side, rolling about frantically to gain a vantage point from which to view the blemish, or something under it, for himself. He cursed the darkness and the shadows that, no matter where he turned, left him with only a view of the tops of her thighs disappearing under her lifted hem like a shining highway entering an unlighted tunnel. His libido tightened its grip on the tiller of his intentions and steered a course straight toward the mouth of the tunnel.

"I think you might get off with the right kind of behavior, young lady," he finally resumed, raising the ante to her with a sizeable stack of chips. "But I ought to warn you that in this courtroom, good behavior might even get you a stiffer sentence."

"Oh my, oh my," she twittered anxiously to conceal her delight at how quickly the talk was turning overtly bawdy. "It's all so confusing; getting off with good behavior, but getting a stiffer sentence on account of it, too. I just don't know what to think." She paused, looking distraught with indecision, and her fingertips distractedly stroked the satin skin of her inner thigh, high up near where the shadows fell, and then, she looked up at him with sad, innocent eyes and asked, "Will I have to do hard time, too?"

"Absolutely, the hardest there is; I'm certain of it," he grunted, eagerly confirming her expectations. He had some reason to be certain on that account because the heat under his robe was building like a tent on fire.

"How long will it be, then?" she inquired impishly, sensing that the ruse of apparent innocence had served its purpose.

"How long will what be?" he responded in search of further commitment from her.

"Why, sir, my stiff sentence, of course," she breathed huskily in a tone that was calculated to allay any residual doubt that she and his libido were on intersecting courses.

"Long enough for you to feel it, I expect," he answered quickly, impulsively taking her cue, but then, he retreated some by explaining, "To make a memorable impression, you know; you'll need to remember it afterwards, otherwise there's no point to it."

"Oh sir," she wailed, "A long sentence seems so harsh and cruel, but I suppose my punishment must fit my crimes." She put her hands together on her lap, since that's where his eyes were already riveted, and wrung them to show him the state of her distress.

"That's not the objective, ma'am," he corrected, unconsciously slamming his gavel to the hilt in the tight sheath of his fist. "We try to make the sentence fit the defendant, not the crime."

"So, you think your stiff sentence will be long enough to fit me just right, Your Honor?" she asked him pointedly while lifting her glass to her lips and watching him steadily as that question built up some steam in his mind.

"Yes, ma'am; I'm counting on it," he answered with a flurry of anticipatory fidgets.

"How's it looking right now?" she inquired brazenly, straightening her back and acting like she was trying to see over his bench, and she took another sip of scotch.

"Your sentence?" He asked pointlessly, verbally fencing with her to postpone the moment of truth.

"Yes," she breathed heavily, exhaling over the rim of her glass.

"It's about as long and stiff as it can get," he reported, swiveling his chair a quarter revolution so she wouldn't see him blushing.

"Oh my," she grinned with no attempt to camouflage her interest. "When can I, er, I mean, do I begin serving my sentence, Judge?" she continued with a deliberate slip of the tongue.

"Immediately, Miss; that's the way we operate here. You receive your sentence and you have to begin serving it right away." His voice had an urgent quality to it that told her that, if her sentence was to be hanging, the noose would already be over the limb.

"Gracious," she gasped, seizing upon his urgency. "I better get started serving my stiff sentence, then, shouldn't I?"

"I think that would be a very good idea," he agreed quickly, but he just kept rocking in his chair and made no move toward her.

"But, sir, how will I know when I'm done serving my sentence?" she asked, resuming with an affectation of coyness to keep him on the hot seat.

"Trust me, Miss, you'll be able to tell that for yourself, and it won't come as any surprise to you, either," he answered, throwing caution nearly to the wind.

"Oooo, Judge," she gushed at his ribaldry. "Do you promise the end of my stiff sentence won't come as a surprise?" The way she repeated his words just about finished him off, but for good measure, while she spoke them, she pretended to fish around in her glass for a speck of foreign matter, and when she stopped talking, she stuck her scotch coated finger into her mouth and fixed her sultry gaze on him while she sucked on it.

"You have my personal guarantee on it, young lady," he said, groaning and partly rising from his chair in a sort of reactive spasm.

"Well, if you're certain," she began, teasing him along with maddening indecision. Then, because she had about exhausted the supply of legal terms that she could corrupt to her purposes and her watching fans had suddenly stopped relaying helpful suggestions through Billy and Danny, she loosed one of the few remaining arrows from her quiver of double entendres, and told him, "But I don't know if I should go down so easily, you know, not putting up much of a defense and all."

"A-hah," he snorted derisively, like he had been expecting her to change her plea at the last minute. "So you're just like all the rest of the sinners around here. The minute your cell door clangs shut behind you and you get a little taste of your sentence, you're going to start complaining that you plead guilty on bad advice and asking for a new trial."

"Oh, no, sir," she protested, waving her wetted finger at him. "It's not that at all; it would take a lot more than a little taste of my sentence to scare me off. It's just that I had some motions that I was hoping to make, you know, in my defense. Maybe after I've made them, my sentence will be reduced."

"Motions? What kind of motions?" he sputtered reluctantly. He, of course, had been mentally sizing her up all along and had her figured to be a perfectly snug fit for the sentence he was hoping to give her, so any reduction was pretty much out of the question. "I already got enough folks around here saying I'm going soft on crime without me reducing your sentence on account of some motion, for Pete's sake."

"'Going soft?'" she giggled in spite of herself. "Oh, sir, I'm sure that whatever long, stiff sentence you come up with, it will have everybody saying you gave me just what I needed."

"Wellllllllllll," he harrumphed again, stroking his chin thoughtfully like he was weighing the pros and cons of a crucial decision. "I hope you're right about that. I guess a motion or two wouldn't be out of order under the circumstances. Let's hear what you got." "May I approach the bench, your Honor?" she asked, kicking off her remaining shoe and running her finger around the neckline of her sweater like, all of a sudden, it wasn't showing enough cleavage and needed a little stretching. "My motions aren't very persuasive if you entertain them from so far away."

"Well, ah, uh, sure," he stammered, leaning across the bench in preparation for another display of bosom, but she had already started moving toward him without waiting for permission, and she wasn't headed for the space directly in front him where his side-bars with lawyers usually took place, either. Instead, she was circling around the witness box toward the steps behind the bench. She moved toward him with measured slowness, but every step was purposeful and exuded the confidence that only the certainty of success permits.

He felt a quick tightening in his chest and his heart went into a state of fibrillation that progressed from mild to severe as she undulated toward him through the gloom. His hands shook and he dropped his gavel on the desk because he feared he couldn't hold it steady. On the inside, his nerves felt tremulous, like he had overdosed on caffeine, and his stomach churned. A sense of breathlessness, akin to oxygen starvation, nearly overcame him, but he remembered Pearly Whitcome's panic attacks, which only responded to deep breathing into a paper-bag for twenty minutes or so, and he was determined to avoid that humiliation. He blinked, and bent to look under the bench to make sure his shoes were matched, and, when he looked up, she was there, standing beside his chair, looking at him with a sort of half smile on her lips and a sultry glow in her eyes that reminded him of the way Diane Thornberry had looked at him that time in the barn when she offered to let him pet her.

He gulped and blinked and shuffled his feet and tried to think of something really cool and clever to say to her, but he never was much good at thinking up stuff when someone was standing over him, so he found himself at a loss for words.

"Did you mean it?" she asked him with a Siren's voice strong enough to shipwreck a thousand ships like Homer's.

"Mean it?" he asked, dazzled to incomprehension by her proximity.

"The compliment. When I was looking at the windows."

"Oh, God, yes," he answered, the words bursting out of his mouth on a rush of inspired wind. "That's only a tenth of it."

"Well, why didn't you say so before? Lord knows, you had plenty of opportunities."

"I didn't want you to feel like you were being taken for granted."

"Ah-hah! Clarence's report."

"Something like that."

"So, you're waiting for me to make the first move?"

"Well," he shrugged, smiling with the wan look of the guilty.

"I just thought you were shy."

"I am shy," he muttered shyly, adding, "Especially when it comes to beautiful, desirable women."

"Do you think I'm a desirable woman, Caleb Montcastle?" Her eyes burned through him and her pitch was low and sultry and soft as the rustle of silk sheets.

His chin dropped and his eyes darted away from hers to begin a careful study of his robed knees. His hands gripped the armrests of his chair like he was riding a wheelchair in an uncontrolled descent down an impossibly steep grade. The closer they came to "Truth," the more he felt like a vise was tightening on his chest. "Yes," he wheezed with the last air in his lungs.

"Is that all?"

"No."

"Well?"

"I, I," he stammered ineffectively.

"Caleb! Look at me," she said in a voice that was insistent and gentle, like a hand steering a child from harm's way.

He lifted his face and squinted into her eyes. They were soft and tender, but they sparkled with the promise of things he feared were beyond his worth. Then, her eyelids fluttered, and she studied him through half closed eyes, while his heart tried to establish a cadence he could live with. She reached to put her hand on his shoulder, and he felt a compelling need to fan himself with the hem of his father's robe.

"Really look at me, Caleb," she insisted when his eyes fastened on the point of her chin.

He gulped once, then again, as her will asserted itself upon him. The revered history of his surroundings yielded to the weight of her fingers on his shoulder, and his gaze dropped from her face to pour ravenously over her sumptuously sculpted curves. Her sensuous lines converged, diverged and merged in his consciousness like brush strokes on a Rubens canvas, and he trembled with the desire to touch her.

"Well?" she said when he reached her bare feet and his eyes lingered upon her toes. "Does the man inside the robe have anything else to say to me?"

"He thinks you are the most desirable woman he's ever seen."

"Then, tell him I'm waiting for him to prove it, Caleb," she said with hushed urgency.

The next few moments fused in a blur of murky memories, and in the weeks and months that followed, try as he might to reconstruct the event, he could recall nothing but staring at her feet at one minute and, in the next, being swept away on a wave of delirious wonder as she suddenly appeared in his arms with her face upturned, offering her lips to him.

Their lips touched as her soft curves molded themselves to his angles and edges, and for the first time, he tasted the indescribable sweetness of her opening mouth. Her aura, tinged with the exuberant hues of her passion, flowed about him, surrounding and enveloping him like mother's milk warmed in the breast, as her tongue found his in the vast emptiness of his longing. Mouths opening, lips churning, tongues entwining, fingers kneading, they bridged the cosmic void and blended, one into the other, like fine lines of script on wetted parchment. They touched, and the prurient obsessions that he had restrained by the unremitting compression of his reticence exploded like Sultana's boilers in a spray of scalding steam.

"Oh, Anne, Anne, Anne," he moaned in a lament of wasted opportunity. "I've wanted you so much."

"Caleb," she sighed eagerly, lifting on tiptoes to welcome his probing tongue and flattening her breasts in the pleats of his robe. "I want you, too; right now, right here! Don't make me wait."

Her arms circled his neck. The hem of her sweater rose and his fingers burned with the touch of her bare skin. They spread, moving unimpeded along her spine, across the strapless expanse of her back to her shoulder blades, and he held her, feeling the quickening rise and fall of her breath under his hands.

"Touch me," she hissed hotly, and she leaned back so his hands could follow her ribs to her front.

His hands slid over satin skin to cup and lift her heavy globes. Nipples, turgid with the electric discharge of her need, rolled stiffly under his thumbs, and she gasped her pleasure in a string of tiny sighs as he caressed her flesh. Lessons learned and lost, relearned and lost again, came swirling into his mind on the whirlwind of his passion, and he milked her rubbery nipples with his thumbs and fingers.

"Oh, Caleb, that feels good," she gurgled as he tugged her points, and he lifted her sweater to expose her breasts.

"Take it off," she moaned before his fingers could recapture her nipples, and she raised her arms above her head.

Cashmere, soft and fine as baby's hair, yet coarse, he thought, in comparison to the velvety smoothness of her skin, floated up her arms and over her head like a puff of dusting powder, and then, she was in his arms again, seeking his mouth with her wildly churning lips and rubbing her nipples into the open weave of his robe. She rolled her hips suggestively against him and her fingers entwined in his hair.

"Hurry. I can't wait much longer," she gasped between kisses when she felt his hands groping to regain to her breasts.

In speechless fervor he let his hands fall to the jutting slopes of her undulating hips. Her tiny skirt, barely a handwidth wide, was stretched tight as a drumhead across her buttocks and he felt her fleshy globes tense as he drew her closer to the pounding need in his loins. She felt his urgency and pressed against him. His hands, cupped, fingers rigid with excitement, slipped under her rounded curves and lifted, holding her close.

She melted against him. Her mouth slipped from his lips to his ear; the point of her tongue traced the rim with an eager sweep and then probed the bowl, sending a rapturous shiver from his shoulders to his knees. She lifted a knee to brush it against his thigh, moaning, "Now, Caleb, I want you now," and suddenly his fingers were in the no-man's land where skirt turns to skin, where the golden highway enters the mouth of the tunnel, and where, if the stars are in the proper alignment, a maybe becomes a yes.

Oh, skin, he gasped to himself as he touched her there. He could write an ode to skin. Elbow skin, shin skin, skin on the throat, the back of the neck, under the arm skin; breast skin, belly skin, thigh skin and chin skin, all of it satiny soft skin that is wonderful to touch to be sure, but yet, all that skin is rough and gritty as sandpaper in comparison to the sublimely velvet skin where buttock becomes thigh, where cheek cleavage merges into loin, where his fingertips were poised, hovering, while his nerve caught up with his needs.