Three Over Par Read online

  She glanced once more behind me. “I don’t want to be late.”

  “You won’t be.” I closed my fingers around the tube of tea-tree gel she kept on the room’s tiny kitchenette. “I’ll be quick, I promise, and you really will feel better.”

  She sighed, giving in, and placed a wrinkled hand on her right thigh, her old bones and handbag preventing her from reaching much farther forward. “That’d be lovely. They’ve been giving me billy-o this morning.”

  As I rubbed heat gel into her knees, she eyed me with eyes like Daniel’s except, in the bright fluorescent light of her room, the iris colour appeared almost gold-green instead of his burnished hazel. They were forest-coloured, though, as if she and her grandson shared a direct genetic link with nature.

  “Are you married, Lucy?”

  “No.” I grinned at her. “No one will have me.”

  She made a noise, a sort of “don’t be ridiculous” humph. “Pretty girl like you ought to have lots of men after her.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t work like that, unfortunately.”

  “My grandson’s not married either and he’s such a handsome boy.” She shook her head. “I really don’t know what’s wrong with girls today.”

  Whether Daniel was married or not had never crossed my mind but the news he wasn’t had me bubble-headed with relief. My morals may be suspect in some people’s eyes, but I do have my own canon, and sleeping with married or even partnered men broke that principle. I’d never had to worry about the Pro. His single status was well known, but Daniel lived so quietly not even the nursing home staff gossiped about him. And the golf club’s members certainly didn’t. After all, he was merely the greenkeeper.

  “Too shy, that’s his problem,” Mrs. Haddon said, still pondering her grandson’s single status.

  I glanced at my watch and gave her knees one final rub. The room was redolent with the slightly antiseptic smell of tea-tree. “That’d make it hard.”

  “His father was the same. Built like the Titanic but wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Never thought he’d find himself a wife, but he did in the end. Lovely girl too.” Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. “I miss them terribly.”

  “Nan?”

  I turned to the door. Daniel filled the space, big hands clenched. My inflated heart flip-flopped, tumbling end over end like a child at play, dizzy with excitement and hungry for attention.

  I’d seen him many times but this was different. Beholding him unshadowed by trees and exposed in the nursing home’s harsh light, I was made acutely aware of just how big he was, how masculine. A blue-and-white-striped shirt draped flawlessly over his broad shoulders and wide chest, the sleeves rolled up to expose muscled, tanned forearms. His neatly pressed jeans hugged his thighs and hips, showing off long, athletic legs. His jaw was clean-shaven, his tawny, sun-kissed hair clean and combed. Physically magnificent and lung-clenchingly handsome, but possessing an expression as ominous as storm clouds.

  “Nan?” He tossed me an unfriendly look before walking into the room. “Are you all right?”

  Mrs. Haddon waved her hand at him. “I’m fine. Just thinking about your father.”

  He gave me another look, an accusing one, as if he thought I’d brought the subject up and tears to his grandmother’s eyes.

  I stood and busied myself with recapping the tube of gel, made nervous and uncertain by the forbidding look in Daniel’s eyes. The little plastic screw-cap fell from my fumbling fingers. Daniel bent and picked it up, holding it out to me in his flattened palm, the way you might feed an apple to a horse to avoid being bitten.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, my insides twisting. For a brief moment he held my gaze and I tried to interpret what I saw, whether that slight softening of his mouth and eyes was real or imagined. A heartbeat later and the impression was lost, his attention distracted by Mrs. Haddon as she pushed herself from her chair in a series of arthritic clicks.

  “Where are we off to today, Daniel?” Now upright, she offered her cheek for him to kiss. “Some fancy French place? Cosy Italian trattoria, perhaps?”

  “Pub. Same as always.”

  She patted his arm. “And beer-battered fish and chips. Just what I like.” She cast me a smile as she shuffled past. “Thank you, love. You were right. I feel much better.”

  “You’re welcome.” I glanced at Daniel, hoping that look had returned, that I’d have something to salvage from this awkward meeting. His face was blank, as if I wasn’t worthy of emotion. As if I wasn’t worthy of anything. Turning his back, he placed his big hand under his grandmother’s elbow and walked her toward the door.

  “Have a nice time,” I called, and winced at how trite it sounded.

  Mrs. Haddon waved over her shoulder. “We will, love. We will.”

  I waited, stupidly hoping, but Daniel didn’t answer.

  A few footsteps later and they were gone, and I was left standing in the room with a tube of arthritis liniment in my hand and my heart sunk into the thick soles of my sensible nurse’s shoes.

  Chapter Three

  Weather has never halted our games. The Pro and I indulge in our sexual pursuits regardless of the conditions, and it’s only the presence of others that curtails our activities. We fuck wet or dry, in heat or cold. We’ve indulged so often I sometimes can’t remember what we have and haven’t done.

  But like everything to do with Daniel, I’ve perfect recollection of the day he joined us the second time.

  The morning dawned like a tropical fever, sweltering and sweaty but with thunderheads looming on the horizon and my radio announcing a sharp southerly change. By lunchtime the weather had built, the summer air crackling with the threat of nature’s fury, and I was sure the Pro would ring to cancel our lesson. He might want sex but he wasn’t stupid enough to play golf in a thunderstorm.

  When the time came and still no call arrived, I loaded my clubs and drove to the course. Two cars sat forlornly in the carpark alongside the Pro’s tired four-wheel drive. One the club president’s, which never seemed to leave the place, and the other belonging to a gentleman by the name of David Nancarrow who’d taken up golf on the advice of his doctor after a minor heart attack. I only knew because Mr. Nancarrow was a regular visitor to Hakea Lodge where his sister resided, and I sometimes caught him in the hall where we’d pause for a chat about golf.

  “I nearly called you.” The Pro nodded at his computer monitor. “Big storm on the radar.”

  I leaned over the counter to look. The Bureau of Meteorology’s website flickered as it scrolled through a sequence of radar shots. Red and orange cells hovered close to Harrington.

  I eyed him. “You want to cancel?”

  “Nope.” He grinned, boyish and cheeky. “This is my favourite time of the week. Anyway, if it comes in too heavy we’ll just have to take cover.”

  An image of the grove on the eighth flitted across my mind’s eye. There was shelter there. And Daniel.

  “Okay.” I was trying to sound casual but inside I was quivering, the way a horse or a greyhound does when it knows it’s about to race. “Where’s David?”

  “Playing the back nine.” He glanced at his watch. “He’ll be coming up the seventeenth about now.”

  “Good.” The eighth and seventeenth fairways ran parallel. By the time we arrived there, David would be long gone. “I’ll get my clubs.”

  After the second or third time we fucked, I stopped paying the Pro for lessons. Neither of us concentrated on our task and it seemed demeaning to both of us for me to keep paying him, as if he were a male prostitute and I some lonely spinster squandering her meagre income on the amusements of a gigolo. The Pro didn’t object when I brought up the matter. His mouth thinned and his eyes slid from mine to the wall and the spot where his Professional Golf Association membership plaque hung.

  “Yeah.” He dropped his eyes and fiddled with something on the computer. “Probably best that way.”

  I had exhaled a long, quiet breath. His guilt
and awareness helped ease the misgivings that had crawled into my mind about our affair, that there was something dirty about our activities. With the money factor removed, we simply became two people indulging our fantasies. Risky behaviour, certainly, but not immoral. Not by my standards, anyway.

  The Pro locked up while I loaded my clubs onto the cart. When the shop was unmanned, the golf club relied on an honesty system for green fees. Players filled out a chit and placed it with their money into an envelope before slipping it through a narrow hole in the wall of the pro shop where it dropped into a locked box behind. With the weather coming in so foul, it was unlikely anyone would use the system, but still he laid out the envelopes and fee book. Fees made up part of the Pro’s earnings and I suspected his teaching income was too unreliable for him to let any go to waste.

  We made our usual interrupted way around the course. My play was atrocious, leaving the Pro shaking his head and tutting with every duffed shot. I tried, but concentration was impossible. My head was overloaded with images of Daniel, my insides vibrating with apprehension. Doubts he’d show kept crawling into my mind. One minute I was convinced his unfounded anger at me for upsetting his grandmother would prevent him from coming. The next, I was once again caught in the magic of that moment when we locked eyes, when his lips pressed so gently against my forehead, as if I was unspeakably dear to him. Though I grasped at the latter impression, my doubt was powerful and with every step, every swing, every revolution of the cart’s wheels, I fretted he wouldn’t come.

  The weather continued its slow but inexorable decay into storm conditions. Every now and then the sky would spit fat drops and we’d look up, our faces damp with perspiration and water, expecting thunder to erupt at any moment. Then, as abruptly as it started, the rain would stop.

  By the seventh, I was wet with sweat and anticipation and my G-string slippery with leaked lubrication. The Pro had brought me off twice. Once on the third with his hand, and again on the sixth using his mouth and the thick grip of my putter. He’d tried to slide it into my arse but I’d told him not to. It wasn’t that I minded foreign objects up there, it was more that using my putter that way seemed plain wrong.

  The first orgasm took less than a minute to blast its white heat into my groin, the second not much longer. The thought of seeing Daniel and what he might do made my skin feel as though it was one great clitoris. Every touch sent electric shocks whirling around my body and my breath gasping. It was as if I had become part of the sky, part of that approaching storm, charged with ions and hot, moist air.

  “Fuck, you’re horny today,” the Pro panted as I deep-throated him in the cart. His fingers tangled in my hair, forcing me harder and harder onto his cock.

  I toyed with his balls and even snuck a finger toward his arse, wanting to bring him off as fast as I’d come. One time, not long after our affair had begun, I nudged the tip into his rigidly closed sphincter. He came almost instantaneously but afterward told me not to do it again. It made him feel odd. I had to suppress a smile and turn away. He loved fucking me up the arse and yet one finger in his own made him feel like a homosexual.

  “Yeah, babe, take it all. Take all my big cock.”

  He pulled my head away and pushed it back down, governing the rhythm of my mouth-fuck. His breath was hoarse, bouncing off the cart’s closed windscreen. I slid my finger closer to his puckered arsehole and tickled the rim. That feather touch was enough to send him over. Come spurted down my throat with a loud “Oh, fuck, Luce!”

  The first few times he came in my mouth I gagged, but now I don’t mind. His ejaculate has the faint taste of oranges and he’s done in two or three spasms and I can spit out what I don’t consume. He loves it that I swallow. Between swallowing and letting him fuck me up the arse, I must be his idea of the perfect woman.

  Orgasm over, we sat in the cart catching our breaths.

  “Fuck, you give great head,” he said, staring at his cock and wiping a drip of come from the tip. He looked at me and a lazy grin spread across his face. “You get turned on by it, don’t you? You want to come again.”

  I did. Badly. My groin was a whirlwind of want, my cunt oily with leaked juices. My nipples were distended and rigid, protruding through the thin fabric of my polo shirt like bullet tips.

  “Not yet.” I cast him a saucy look. “Not until the eighth.”

  The Pro reached across and playfully pinched my left nipple. A bolt of lightning hit my groin and I shuddered and mewled, a sound of pure want.

  “You sure you can wait that long?” He slid his hand up my thigh and under my short skirt and used a finger to tease me through the gusset of my G-string. “You’re so horny I bet you come in seconds.”

  Gritting my teeth, I gripped his hand and pulled it away. “Don’t.”

  He nodded and I thought I caught a hint of wryness in his expression. “You want Dan, don’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  He leaned in close, his breath hot on my ear, the imagined wryness replaced by craft. “You want me to fuck you up the arse while Dan watches, don’t you?” When I didn’t answer, he continued in that low, teasing whisper. “Maybe you want him to lick that wet pussy of yours while I’m sunk into your tight little hole.” He smiled, his sea-grey eyes sparkling with lust and amusement. The teasing was turning him on as much as me. “Maybe you want both of us together, one in each hole, fucking you hard, making you scream.”

  I stepped out of the cart and grabbed the first club my fist closed around. He’d just listed all the fantasies that had been infecting my dreams and ruining my sleep for the past week. They’d even come to me at work, in monotonous times when my mind was free to drift. Once, the image had been so vivid, so arousing, I’d had to relieve myself in a toilet cubicle, orgasming quickly and silently on my hand while another staff member urinated in the adjacent stall, oblivious to my activity.

  The Pro laughed as I stomped to my ball. My swing was abysmal, but I managed to catch the ball cleanly. It sailed high in the air before plopping down a short distance away. I looked at my club and suppressed an urge to javelin the sand wedge toward the Pro. After all, it wasn’t his fault I’d snatched the wrong club, and they’d cost me too much money to damage them with my sexually frustrated temper.

  I stalked back to the cart for my five iron.

  “Pick it up,” the Pro said, giving me an uncharacteristic reprieve.

  I raised my eyebrows and eyed his groin as I dropped my sand wedge into the bag. His cock was tucked back into his shorts but it curved, pronounced and turgid against the soft cotton. The teasing articulation of my fantasies had affected him as much as me, and he wanted to act them out.

  The Pro drove straight past the eighth tee and parked the cart near our secret place. As a precaution, I threw my ball at the fallen log. If anyone wandered by we could pretend we were hunting for it. The ball ricocheted at an angle toward the thick undergrowth, but I didn’t follow its trajectory. I was too busy searching the trees for Daniel.

  I turned to the Pro. He was already behind me, eyes on my arse. “Is he coming?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno.”

  I scanned the scrub again, anxious for a flash of Daniel’s khaki work clothes, a streak of that sun-kissed hair. That yearning, haunted look I’d analysed and shredded myself trying to interpret for the past week.

  A fat blowfly buzzed drunkenly past my vision. By the mottled base of the nearest gum, a top-knot pigeon scratched in the dirt. Bees hovered industriously over the bottlebrush-like flower clusters of a native melaleuca. Nature’s creatures continuing their simple lives while I exhausted myself stupidly complicating my own.

  My fears had been realised. Daniel wasn’t coming.

  The Pro wedged against my back, his erection fitting into the cleft of my buttocks. His hands slipped around my waist and slithered up my shirt. His lips pressed against the hollow of my neck. Seductively, as his palms glided over my smooth skin toward my taut breasts, he began to grind against me.

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nbsp; “I’m going to fuck that tight arse of yours, babe. Fuck it really hard.”

  I closed my eyes. They prickled with the near-shed of tears. I’m not the sort of person who normally feels sorry for herself but at that moment rejection had me plunged in self-pity. I had wanted Daniel to be there so badly, his absence left me stupefied with hurt.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  The arse-grinding ceased. “Sure you do, babe.”

  Though he tried to sound confident, uncertainty threaded the Pro’s voice. I’d never said no before. He paused, his need manifest in the labour of his breath. He didn’t want to stop. His lips touched my flesh once more, his tongue flicking my sweat-salted skin while he thought.

  The respite was short. In a chain of delicate licks and sucks that sent an erotic shudder coursing down my back, he snuck his mouth up my neck to pant warm, throaty words into my ear. “He’s teasing you. Watching from some hiding place. He’ll come out when you’re just about to blow. Like before.” The grinding resumed. The Pro had his confidence back. “You love it when he watches, don’t you, babe? Gets that tight hole of yours all wet and dripping for some hot cock.”

  The Pro’s whispers worked. Lust sent tentacles of heat throbbing in my groin. My nipples tautened and he rewarded me by tweaking them. My cunt spasmed in response as though jolted with electricity. A dribble of fluid snaked down my inner thigh. It could have been sweat but I knew it was pure desire, oozing from me in viscous trails.

  We were both perspiring in the static, humid air, damp chest to sticky back. As always, the Pro smelled of the musky soap he uses but there was an undernote of animal, as if the heat and approaching storm had brought out something feral in him.

  His right hand slid down my stomach and over my thighs. The thin fabric of my skirt adhered to my legs like cling film. He gathered up my skirt, raising it, showing me off to the trees and, I silently implored, Daniel.

  The Pro kept up his teasing, his voice earthy and provocative. He’d worked out how much the thought of Daniel’s voyeurism turned me on and was exploiting the weakness. “He’s watching, babe. Eyeing that wet pussy of yours.”