Circle Gold

"Can I come and watch?" he shot back.

"Marcus! Of course not. We are proud women and value our privacy." She snickered loudly.

"Your privacy," he retorted. "Baby, I've seen and been into more of you beauties in the last two days than any guy can see during a pee break. Just one question: can two women use the restroom one-at-a-time, or do you always have to do it in pairs?" He knew this playful jibe would get her.

"Mark, there you go again! I'm not debating female toilet procedures; I'm busy, as you can see." She balanced herself with one hand on a small pine as she lifted her leg and relieved herself. Courtney, with no hesitation, did the same but faced Mark instead.

"Gotta hand it to the two of you...you are sexy, even when you do that," he complimented them.

"All right, Mister Evaluator. Here we are, ready for action." Both women were perspiring profusely. Their upper bodies and bare legs bore a sheen of moisture, and drops of sweat dripped from their nipples.

"Do the two of you have any idea just how hard I am trying to maintain a semblance of decorum with you standing there, wet and delicious, and I just had the pleasure of seeing everything you own under those skirtlets?" Mark made no effort to hide his hunger for them.

"Just what we wanted to cause, Lover of my soul," Lauren said softly.

"I am so in love with my breasts," she remarked to the girl. "I hope you enjoy yours that way, too."

She took Courtney's hand and set off up the trail, not letting go of the girl. The walk was definitely farther than their first one and the teen regaled them with a local history that surprised Lauren and Mark for the extent of her interest in the subject. Most people nowadays, he thought, had a grasp of history about as large as their daily operating vocabulary...and that was what you could write in grease pencil on the back of a matchbook.

She proved to be familiar with a lot of Civil War lore, the conflict known in this part of the South as The War Between the States. They ambled along enjoying the day, being where they were and doing what most people never get a chance to do...hunt for buried treasure with the likelihood that they'll find something of value.

"Well, what do you know!" exclaimed Mark as he stopped the buggy and headed off the trail to a boggy area a few yards away. "Pitcher plants. This is something most people have never seen. They aren't a common growth."

Both women, wiping sweat from their faces, decided to humor him and followed, circling him when they reached the moist area. They squatted to stare at the odd green plants shaped like tall pitchers. Neither was concerned in the slightest that her miniscule skirt had hiked up to reveal everything between her thighs. Lauren tugged absentmindedly at the long fur of her delta as she touched the body of the interesting plant; Courtney delicately fingered her lips with the five-inch talon on her index finger, as if she were stroking the wings of a butterfly. Mark did his best to concentrate on the pitcher plants, an act for which he should have received a medal, but gave up to gaze enviously at his two women.

"Thank you, my lovely boy," whispered Lauren, kissing him lightly. Courtney leaned forward to follow her, sparring with the tip of his tongue outside his mouth. "Mark, thank you," she smiled, then stood and helped Lauren up.

Two hundred yards farther down the trail, Courtney motioned that they should turn right and head into the woods. After nearly half an hour of minor brush-busting, two re-directions and more sweat soaking their bodies, Courtney exclaimed, "There...there it is!"

Ahead on the edge of a field covered with low scrub protruded the partially visible outcrop of dark stone. The teen led her friends to it, obviously excited that she had been able to bring them to something they valued greatly. "See, look under this little overhang...see those odd lines?"

One look and Mark and his mother glanced at each other and nodded. "It's the same."

Mark put his hand on Courtney's shoulder and said, "Court, I don't want to get your hopes too high yet, but I think you are going to get the surprise of your life somewhere nearby. Will you unstrap the metal detector, and Princess, if you'll haul out the shovel. I think we've found another one."

Sweaty bodies, that certain odor of the wild that humans give off when they have labored hard, regardless of how sexy they might be, and any discomfort from brambles that tugged at their socks were all forgotten as the three worked to get their search under way. He could see that Courtney yearned to ask what they were searching for, but he decided to let Lauren do the sweeps with the detector and the girl would dig when they found a target. Her surprise would be complete.

Lauren swept the area in grids as she had seen Mark do at the other site, but this time she worked for nearly an hour before the detector sang loudly. Apparently, there was something of considerable size down there. Mark asked Courtney to begin digging at her own pace until she struck something. He spread the ground cover at the edge of the excavation, and she knelt on her knees to start the work.

Lauran and he were impressed that she never spoke a word of complaint or objection at the work. It was hard; she had to contend with more roots and tendrils than Lauren had done at the first site. Mark stooped, wiped her face, and kissed her.

"You're doing a good job. I'll bet you hit something in the next few minutes. But whatever you do, precious girl, do not damage those gorgeous nails."

Chapter 17

The Find

Then there it was...the shovel clanked against something large and made of heavy glass from its sound. Courtney scrambled downward, ready to haul out the object, when Mark restrained her. "Keep digging with the shovel...we don't want you to even come close to damaging those gorgeous hooks of yours."

Gradually she uncovered what appeared to be a large, heavy glass container capped by a lead screw-on lid and filled with a viscous, dark amber liquid. "Can you lift it, Honey?" asked Lauren. "I...umfff...," grunted Courtney as she tried to pull the object out of its resting place.

"No. Lauren, help me."

Together they hauled the object out of the ground and laid it on its side. "I cannot believe what I'm seeing," Mark muttered. "That stuff is oil, 100-year-old oil packed with no air in the bottle, and that thing inside it is a revolver. I can't see it clearly, but it looks as if it is completely preserved. Court, please shove it off to the side here, and then see what else is down there."

She continued digging and quickly turned up the remnants of a rotted, oil-soaked box. She carefully pulled it out and set it between her legs, then carefully tugged away the scraps of wood and cloth to reveal the dull yellow length of a wrist-size gold bar about four inches long.

Courtney looked up at her friends and said with wonder, "This is buried treasure. This is buried treasure, isn't it!"

"Yes, Angel," laughed Lauren at her joy, "that's what you've found. It dates back to the years of tragedy and upheaval following the Civil War. Keep working...there is probably more down there."

An eighteen-year-old girl only rarely in five lifetimes would experience what Courtney knew for a fact. Her friends of only a few days had let her in on something so special and rare that she would never have words to adequately explain the sensations coursing through her body and mind. As she continued moving dirt with the shovel she was surprised by tears gathering in her eyes.

A moment later there was another 'clink-clank' as the tool hit something else. Lauren bent and carefully pulled two more jars from the hole, these similar in size, seals and contents to those she and Mark had discovered previously. A third jar contained a variety of metal items, one of which appeared to be a six-pointed star with an inscription on it. They could not identify the other objects in the jar, but the three of them would examine all of it when they got back to the cabin.

"Now, Courtney, wipe the jars with this rag and tell us what you see inside." She complied and gasped as she made out gold and silver coins she had never seen in real life. Edgar Poe's The Gold Bug, Captain Kidd's and Edward Teach's buried treasures, the Legends of the Sierra Madre, none of those tales that had fascinated her as she was growing up could hold a candle to what she now held in her hands for real.

"There are several $20 gold coins with a beautiful figure on them and the date 1870, another little wad of $10 coins and a lot of silver with what look like Indian princesses and another woman. Is all of this real?"

"Sweet girl," said Lauren, overjoyed at her happiness and amazement, "it is as real as Christmas, a Chevy 409, and this gorgeous man right here beside us."

"All right, you delicious, sweaty, sorta grimy and generally sensuous girl...let me get in there and spell you. You can stay right here beside me and watch," and Mark patted the earth. "Remember those nails are now a company treasure."

"Courtney, what my horny son is really doing is setting you up so he can stare at that beauty between your legs while he pretends to dig a little bit. But mostly, he wants to ogle you...something at which he is highly skilled. Believe me, lover, I speak from a wealth of experience." She let out a throaty laugh and winked at Mark.

He feigned a deeply wounded spirit with a contorted expression, then grinned broadly. "Okay, beautiful sweaty one, how'd you know?"

"You have to be kidding, Mark. I know you, Darling. Oh, boy, do I ever know you in the deepest sense of that luscious word. You do it to me...and Parker...and Arabella...and that delicious tranny girl of ours, Ashwynde...you do it to us all the time. And now you are welcoming Courtney into our midst with the same horny stares."

He laughed happily. Then his mother added, "Of course, if you ever stop all your sexy looks and remarks and touches, we'll kill you. After the group of us screwed you nonstop for a year while we cloned you to keep going forever, that is." Lauren giggled at her cleverness and shook her breasts at him.

"Well," growled Mark in his best Clint Eastwood imitation, "'A man's got to know his limitations.' Since I have none, I can comply easily with your demand, oh angelic sexpot!"

"Marcus," retorted his mother, determined to have the last word in this battle of goofiness, "you are such a gorgeous, smartass lover. No wonder I was helplessly drawn into your web of intrigue, sensuous love and just plain raw sexual conquest of me!"

"Any complaints, my delightful and uninhibited woman?"

"Never a single one, sweet man. Never a single one."

With the verbal love-play ended, a trademark of so much of the PRISM family's lives, Mark dug a few more small holes as Lauren swept the surrounding ground with the metal detector; Courtney crouched beside him, more than pleased to expose everything between her powerful thighs and aroused by his intermittent glances. What teenager wouldn't be excited by the hungry stares of a sensuous man who, at moments, chose her to admire rather than an incredible treasure right beside him!

"I think we are finished here," Lauren announced. I'll restore the ground while the two of you get that cart packed and ready to move."

Courtney and Mark quickly readied the buggy, then the three stepped back to see if anyone else could pick out where they had dug up the gold. The land appeared to have never been touched. They fell quiet as the aura and thoughts of a violent age long ago swept over them with a warm, enveloping mist, lightly dimming the sun to resemble old gold wrapped in cotton and caressing their skin with its tendrils in a futile effort to draw them back in time.

"Mark and I discovered another one of these sites several days ago, Courtney. You cannot overlook the sense of history around here, of a strange connection with those people who were much like us with hopes and dreams...however misguided...the way in which we discovered this through Mark's old friend and a movie! And now we have found what those people worked so hard to conceal for plans that could never have worked."

The women took turns drying their bodies with a towel Mark had brought along, then he and Lauren brushed out each other's hair and rebound both masses into pony tails. Courtney ambled slowly in a circle around them, the rings in her nipples dancing with her movements, lightly tickling her hard tips. The girl appeared to be lost in her thoughts. She may have been young and sensuous, but Mark and Lauren had sensed a yard-wide streak of seriousness and an unplumbed depth to her.

Their return to the cabin was almost entirely in silence; none of them wanted to break the hold of what had just happened and all that had led up to it. Mark volunteered to put away everything while the women cleaned up and dressed for the evening.

Chapter 19

Buried Evil and a Gift

Lauren returned to the deck where Mark reclined on the lounge, for once burned out and not afraid to show it. She wore a yellow sleeveless and cropped gauze top that hung loosely from her breasts, and a deliciously tight pair of black micro-shorts so miniscule from the hem of the legs to the top of the waist band that several inches of her lush black fur showed above her belt. Black tufts of her fur peeked out around the inside of the legs. She padded barefoot over to her son and sat beside him.

"Marcus," she said with a serious expression clouding her features, "There is something wrong with Courtney."

"What do you mean?"

"We were enjoying our bath together," she grinned knowingly, "and I was standing behind her to hold her breasts. When I squeezed her slightly to hug her, she cried out in pain. She let me press under her breasts very gently, and she cried out again. I think she's got some cracked or broken ribs. And I believe Ken has been abusing her...invisible to see, but there, nevertheless. We'd like for you to check her out. If she is hurt, we need to get her to a doc-in-a-box if there's nothing else near here. If there's a hospital, she needs to go there."

Lauren went back inside to get the girl. She was dressed in a white spaghetti-strap tank top that hung to her navel and khaki denims. She sat beside Mark and allowed him to remove her top. 'No doubt about it,' thought Lauren, 'she's one of the biggest girls for someone so slender that I've ever seen. Lord, she's incredible!'

Mark was quiet and serious as he lightly touched the teen beneath her left breast, drawing from her a quick gasp of pain. He kissed her and apologized, then he ran his fingers beneath that point and over under her right breast. This, too, caused her to wince.

"Courtney, I'm almost certain that you have several cracked ribs. Do you hurt anywhere else? How did this happen?"

"Ken has been hitting me for a year now. It all started when he had an affair with a guy and a girl who live near here. I told him I didn't object if that was what he wanted to do. He knew McKenzie and I had been lovers for a while and he didn't mind, but then he began to change...and to get rough. He would squeeze my breasts until they hurt because he said that 'no girl as skinny as me should have guns as big as mine'. He thought that was funny. He would call himself The Tit-Reducer."

"What in the world do your big breasts and a slender body have to do with the price of hogs in China?"

"I don't know. He was just ugly about everything. But he buries it well. You'd never know if I hadn't told you and if you hadn't discovered my ribs. I don't know what to do...I can't go on like this." She began to sob quietly, holding onto Lauren.

"Here's what happens now," Mark stated. "We're taking you to the hospital for X-rays and a doctor's advice. Then we are coming back here to show you something and make you...," and he dropped his voice into his best Marlon Brando Godfather growl, '...we'll make you an offer you can't refuse'."

A doctor's examination and X-rays proved their concerns accurate; Courtney had one broken rib and two with greenstick breaks. The female physician said, "I've seen far too much of this sort of thing. My advice to you is to save yourself. This is not an accident and he will repeat it. Leave there before you get permanently hurt...or he kills you." The girl nodded silently.

There was no conversation on their way back to the cabin, but when they arrived, Mark said, "Lauren, let's go to the big room. I'm going to show you what we got today, and then I have a plan for you if you'll agree, Courtney."

Once seated at the kitchen table, Mark brought out the first jar of gold coins and opened it, gradually emptying its contents onto the flat tiger-striped oak surface. Silence reigned as the three stared at the hoard of coins before them, coins bearing the dates of a period that had dropped out of time more than a hundred years before.

Without any discussion, Mark divided the treasure into halves, then put one into a plastic freezer bag and shoved it over to the girl seated with them. He did the same with the bottle of silver coins, halving the pile and moving another bag of coins in front of her. She stared uncomprehendingly.

"Lauren already knows what I'm doing. One half of this goes to the widow of our friend Carey. He told me about the possibility of treasure on our land and I promised to take care of his wife and son. These sacks of coins are yours, Courtney."

The girl looked on in silence, still not grasping what was happening to her. A thousand thoughts raced through her mind...the way she had met this couple, their unabashed sexual openness, a mother and her son in love, buried treasure they had permitted her to find, their kindness in getting her to the hospital, and now this. They were giving her something so valuable that she was certain people had killed for it and would again if they knew about it. And her husband would never let her keep it.

"Wh...uh...what do you mean, Mark?" she stammered in astonishment.

"Courtney, we want you to go with us to Florida to meet a few other very capable, very unusual people who are interested in helping you get a fresh start in life. And we might very well be able to use you to start something new in our company. Would you consider it?"

"You're giving me this when you hardly know me. If I turn you down about the trip, what then?"

"You keep it, Sweetheart," said Lauren with a knowing smile. "But think about this, Courtney. You have nothing if you decide to make a break from your husband. Now you own something of immense value. The only problem is that if you do not go, you will still be alone and within his reach. And you'll have the additional problem of explaining how you got an awful lot of very uncommon money. We care very much for you and want you to become a part of a successful business that you already know about, PRISM Designs. We want you to assist in starting a new feature of our erotic website."

"You are offering me a job with that company that does all of that gorgeous and explicit photography of...of nudes and erotica and...and everything? And you want me to help you start something new in it? But what can I possibly do for you? And I'm only a little over eighteen."

"We want to help you start an entire section featuring nude men and women in flexible and gymnastic poses. We can explain the details later. We know from experience just how skilled at that you are. We'd like for you to come with us, look over the place, and if you are willing, live with us there. Three other gorgeous girls are also part of our group, and you'll grow to love them, too. They already know about you and want to meet you.

"In fact, Mark will you log into our website and get the zip file that contains erotic images of everybody at 'Swamp Central,'...that's what we call our office in the 'glades...and let Courtney go through it to meet our enjoyable and unusual managing group?"