Free The Stallion (1996) by Harold Robbins Page B

him to do,” she said.
    “So how do we avoid emasculating him?” asked Angelo. “If I care.”
    “We work it,” she said. “You give me ideas. I’ll feed them to him, on the pillow. He’ll show up at the office filled with enthusiasm for your idea.”
    “He’s that big a fool?”
    She smiled. “You’ve known him longer than I have,” she said.
    “I feel like I’m … being sucked into a whirlpool.”
    “There’s a good word,” said Roberta with a wicked smile. “‘Sucked.’ Sucked you’re gonna get. And more.” She pulled off the shirt again and this time tossed it across the room. “We’ll seal the bargain between us—the one nobody but us knows about.”
    “Roberta, I—”
    “Don’t make an enemy of me, Angelo. I want you to build your car. I can help you or I can block you. The Mustang was not called the Lee, and your new car won’t be called the Angelo. But everybody’ll know who did it.”
    She continued to undress and was naked in a matter of seconds.
    “This isn’t a necessary part—,” he started to say.
    “This is an important goddamned bargain,” she said. “And it can’t be written down. What would you have it on, a handshake? No. Hey—you remember how they used to mark survey lines in medieval England? They’d take a boy out to an essential point on the line, and there they’d take his pants down and beat his ass bloody. That way they could be sure he would never forget the place. It wasn’t just something shown to him; it was the place where he’d got hisass whipped, and he’d never forget. Well, you’re not going to forget tonight, and neither am I. We’re not going to forget what we agreed to on the night when—”
    Angelo nodded. “It’ll be memorable,” he conceded.
    “Just to be sure it is, come here to the couch. I’m going to lie across your legs, and I want you to spank me until my butt gleams pink.”
    “Roberta…”
    “I mean it, Angelo. Until I cry and beg you to stop. Then we’ll remember our deal. Then we’ll do two or three other things that will reinforce our memory. Fancy fuckin’, Perino. Not the usual stuff.”
    She turned her head around and laughed at him after his first slap on her behind. She winced after the second and clenched her teeth and grimaced after that. In time she began to cry, but he did not stop because she had not begged. Then she did. She was still sobbing as she knelt and sucked his penis between her lips. She worked on him so hard he was not sure he would be able to do what she promised was next.
    In bed she grunted under him and emitted little squeals. “Ohh!” she cried gutturally. “Angelo’s a steel-drivin’ man!”
3
    He awoke the next morning to the ringing of the telephone. It was a secretary at the Hardeman house, saying Mr. Hardeman would like to see him before he caught his plane for New York. Would that be possible?
    The plane left at 10:10, so he had time to drive to the beach and meet the old man once more.
    It was not the old man who met him. It was Loren. He waited on the lanai, with a breakfast of coffee, Danish, and fruit laid out.
    The weather had cleared, and the early-morning sun was red over a gentle surf slip-slapping on the beach. Stranded Portuguese men-of-war died slowly as the water at low tide failed again and again to reach them.
    “Number One is asleep,” said Loren.
    “At his age, he’s entitled.”
    “I’ll be brief, Angelo,” Loren continued. “Number One and I would like to call you wrong about the new car, but we know you’re right. We also have to acknowledge that you’re right about making the deal with Shizoka. Obviously, Number One isn’t designing any more cars or negotiating any more deals. My own skills don’t lie in automotive engineering or in negotiating with Japanese businessmen. We need you. So there. Did you ever think you’d hear me say that?”
    “I don’t need you, Loren.”
    “Hell, you never did. You’re the kind of guy who’d be a success in