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  WHEN WE WERE MARRIED

  VOLUME THREE – THE WIND IS RISING

  Part One – Two Weeks in November

  By Daniel Quentin Steele

  © Daniel Quentin Steele 2013

  Kindle License Notes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, Daniel Quentin Steele.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: The Loom of Fate

  Chapter 1: Beauty As Fragile As Glass

  Thread 1: Spring City Florida

  Chapter 2: The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Chapter 3: You Were Always the Only One

  Chapter 4: The Talk They Should Have Had

  Chapter 5: You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs

  Thread 2: Ciudad Juarez

  Chapter 6: Uncle Sam Has His Eye On You

  Thread 3: The Gift

  Chapter 7: Answers In Plain Sight

  Chapter 8: Where Are The Happy Marriages?

  Chapter 9: The World Is a Very Small Place

  Chapter 10: Satsuma Comes Calling

  Chapter 11: You Don’t Step Into a Rattlesnake’s Lair

  Chapter 12: The Hard Part Is Getting Out Of the Office On Friday Night

  Chapter 13: Single White Roses

  Thread 4: Tangerine, Satsuma County

  Chapter 14: There Are No Dull Friday Nights In Jacksonville

  Chapter 15: Myra’s Message and Cassandra’s Plea

  Chapter 16: Nothing But a Hero

  Chapter 17: There Are Some Dates You Can’t Forget

  Chapter 18: Life Is What Happens

  Chapter 19: Life Is What Happened

  Chapter 20: The Wind Is Rising

  Chapter 21: And the Storm Is Coming

  Author Note: Characters

  Author Note

  About the Author

  Other Books in the When We Were Married Series

  FOREWORD – THE LOOM OF FATE

  Life is a tapestry. Think of one of those Arabic panels that covers most of a wall; the intricate weave of hundreds or thousands of colorful threads tangled together to create pictures out of nothing but fabric, imagination, and the creator’s mind. It’s a motif that crosses cultures. The Northmen saw the Norns, the Romans the Moira or in English the Fates.

  The picture most of us have, the one I saw in high school and stuck in my head, is from Greek mythology, the three old women at a loom running the threads through their wizened hands, each thread being a mortal’s life. There are times when I lie in bed alone in the darkness, a pastime I spend entirely too much time at lately, and I think about the thread that is my life.

  As their fingers ran down the thread, they read the story of the lives of the mortals whose fates they laid out. I’ve been on this earth for 42 years. I am a prosecutor, a man charged in the Northeast Florida section dubbed the First Coast with the duty of putting bad and evil and dangerous men and women away behind bars where they cannot hurt again.

  I was a husband, to the beautiful Debbie Bascomb whom I met and won at the University of Florida 20 years ago. Until she met professor Doug Baker and decided she didn’t want to be married to me any longer. But she bore me two children I love and thus I am a father and that will probably never change.

  I was a lover to the beautiful and married Aline des-Jardins, wife of a good man and friend, the French federal prosecutor Philippe Archambault. Until she decided that she couldn’t abandon a husband she still might love in Paris, and a son she definitely did love.

  I have had more women in the last eight months than I had over the last 20 years. Not too hard to do when there was only one woman throughout that 20-year-period of my life. I’ve had four good women since Debbie threw me away. And I could have had one really, REALLY bad girl who appeals to something dark and twisted inside me that I never even knew was there. Until she reached out and touched it. So far I’ve managed not to touch her back. So far…

  I have an increasingly unreal legend as the Angel of Death as mortality touches more and more people around me. It’s all PR, but when people believe something strongly enough, it might as well be real. Even though it’s BS, defenders and criminals look at me differently and I use that.

  I do have a real Angel of Death standing at my back. It complicates my life in ways I will probably never fully comprehend and someday it may be me killed, but I brought this on myself and if it does not get me killed, or thrown into the deepest, darkest dungeon Homeland Security can find to bury me in, it may wind up saving everything I hold precious.

  There are dozens of cases coming down the pike. Most pressing is the case of a cold blooded asshole who murdered his wife and unborn son to keep her $5 million inheritance and probably killed again in one week early in 2005. I have no real evidence, no proof that a second murder even occurred and a witness who is key to my case almost certainly won’t survive till the trial.

  I probably can’t win this one, but I will try.

  As I will try to put away a Mexican scumbag who could be put to death in Florida’s death chamber, which may be the reason the Feds might send him here for trial. And the fact that his Mexican Cartel masters have been warned by a man and an organization that might be more dangerous than they are that touching me and mine will ignite a war will make the next months interesting.

  All of this is part of The Loom of Fate, a weave that spans oceans and continents, tying men and women who I may never know to my life. The thread of my life is intertwined with hundreds, thousands, of other people. Some of whom I know or knew.

  My father, my mother…an old man who fatally injected his comatose wife to be with his new lover…a 6-foot-2 inch deadly black drug dealer whose brother I’d treated fairly, a lovelorn newspaper writer who transformed my life forever without my permission, a gorgeous blonde I’d met in the midst of a gang rape, a hero cop who broke the law for love’s sake and paid the ultimate price, a cold blooded murderer who was willing to kill his wife and unborn son for money…

  The threads extend like spider webs across states and countries and oceans.

  CHAPTER ONE: BEAUTY AS FRAGILE AS GLASS

  November 4, 2005

  Friday, 9 P.M.

  Matanzas, St. Johns County

  My name is William Maitland. I am an attorney, a divorced husband, a father, a son, and pretty much a loser in the game of love. Some would disagree. For a short, bald, not too overwhelmingly attractive a guy, I have had my moments. I won the heart of one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. I enjoyed her body and think I had her heart for most of our married life.

  That ended badly. Think “Titanic” bad and you’ll know where I’m coming from. Do 15 years of sheer bliss outweigh two to three years of increasing shit and six months of open heart surgery without anesthesia, which is what our split felt like?

  That was Debbie. And then I met Aline. Who was also way, way too good for me. And I fought. God, how I fought. I tried to do the right thing because she was married to another man. But I fell.

  And instead of nearly 20 years, I had part of one week at sea and two weeks in my home town. Then she was gone too. And I learned that you don’t grow scar tissue over the space where your heart used to be. It hurts just as much the second time around.

  And now I am back in my favorite spot, walking the dunes of a night beach, listening to the waves crashing along the Matanzas shoreline. I am walking beside the curvy silhouette of the woman most men would say was the sexiest piece of ass ever to trod the streets of Jacksonville.

  Myra Martinez, who fortunately I can look down on instead of up at,
is more than the personification of sheer, hot sex, a walking wet dream. She is an intelligent, compassionate person who just happens to possess the best boobs and ass I’ve ever seen. She has been a co-worker for nearly six years, a friend for nearly eight months, and….something else in the last month or so.

  I do not love her. I do not know if I could love her. I could definitely fuck her. But those are two separate urges. I also know that she is more than a woman I want to fuck. There is something else there, if only deep friendship and respect. And I had thought things would go smoothly and we’d wind up in bed and just have fun.

  How stupid was that? The only time things have ever gone that smoothly in my life, back to my teen years, was when a woman meant absolutely nothing to me except a place to insert my dick. Emotions have a way of screwing things up.

  And there is an undercurrent to…us. I haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re either going to walk away and chalk it up to a bad idea tonight, or we’re going to move on to the next level.

  “How did you know this was my absolute favorite place on earth?”

  She reached out and it was the most natural thing in the world to take her hand and keep walking down the dunes. Her eyes shone as moonlight reflected off them.

  “It’s all part of my seduction plan.”

  She gave me a look and then laughed.

  “Please, please don’t take this the wrong way, Bill, but I can’t see you as a cunning seducer. It’s not your style.”

  “You got me, Myra. I had no idea this was your favorite place. Truth is, I don’t know that much about you at all. But, this has always been one of my favorite places. Not only because it’s beautiful.”

  She stopped and turned, facing me. She was wearing white jeans and a loose top that she tied loosely at her hips. I wondered again as I had so many times how in the hell she stayed upright.

  “You know I’m a curious type. I’m a woman. So spill. Why is this place special to you?”

  I looked out at the silvered waves rolling into the shore and went back in my head 24 years to a summer night.

  “I wasn’t hideous when I was a kid, but I’ve never been hunk material. And I’ve always been a little….shy. So I wasn’t precocious…sexually. One night in June in 1981 I talked Rebecca Knowles into coming out here with me after a school dance. I carried a blanket and I brought along some beers and we stopped and got some KFC. Picnic time.

  “I’d been out with Rebecca a few times and she wasn’t going steady with anyone. She was pretty. A blonde…I’ve kind of been partial to blondes. And nice. She was a nice girl. We had a few beers and watched the stars and then she dared me to strip down and she took off everything but her bra and panties and I stripped to my underwear and we ran into the surf.

  “We froze our asses off and were screaming and hooting. A good thing no deputies were patrolling around here. We came back here and lay on the towels I’d brought and shivered. And then….I don’t know how…she was in my arms and then she wasn’t wearing anything at all and…I was inside her and we were doing it.”

  I couldn’t help shaking my head as if even after all these years, I still couldn’t’ believe I had gotten so lucky.

  “It was wonderful. It didn’t’ last long and I had a hard time getting it in there until she helped me and I doubt she got off…but it was fucking wonderful.”

  I could see her gleaming white teeth as she smiled. She squeezed my hand.

  “That summer I worked for one of my father’s cousins who had moved down here years ago. He owned a paving company. One of the old fashioned kind where you shoveled hot tar out of the back of a truck and then smoothed it out for parking lots and driveways and that kind of thing. There were some guys I worked with. One was an old black guy. I think he was old. He might have been in his 50s.

  “Us young guys got to talking about sex and the women we’d had and for the first time I was able to take part in the conversation – without lying my ass off. I’ll never forget. He just laughed and said the worst sex he had ever had was wonderful. I never forgot that. I knew exactly what he meant.”

  I pulled her closer to me but didn’t kiss her.

  “That was the night I gave up my ‘virgin’ card. That makes this place special to me.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me.

  “So this is your make out spot? Where you take all the women you plan to have sex with?”

  “There’s a dune not too far away that has a little wooden plaque that reads, ‘reserved for Bill Maitland and assorted bimbos’.”

  She bit down hard enough on my lower lip to make me wince.

  “One thing I’ve always liked about you is your robust sense of humor.”

  “Find me one woman that likes to be referred to as a bimbo.”

  “You really think I’d refer to you as a bimbo and not be joking.”

  We were kissing again and when she pulled away she said, “No, of course not. I just have to keep you on your toes.”

  “You’ve already got me, way, way up.”

  “I could tell,” she said leaning into me. As the night breeze played with her long golden hair, those heavy globes pressed against me and I felt the rhythm of her breathing, felt the warm softness between her legs and I felt like I could hammer railroad spikes with my dick.

  I ran my hand over one of those breasts, closed and squeezed and loved the sudden intake of breath, the catching of it in her throat. I squeezed one nipple until it rose fat and firm in my palm. She was like every Playboy or Juggs model I’d ever jerked off to at night in my room with the door closed and locked. Only this was no fantasy. It was all real, human, warm flesh.

  She pressed her lips to my throat and gave me a hickey. Fortunately, I didn’t give a damn who saw anything she left on my body.

  I ran my left hand down and caught her luscious ass in my palm and squeezed, pulling her toward me and rubbing her all over the railroad spike I’d smuggled in my trousers.

  She moaned, pushed herself harder against me, then she twisted in my arms so her back was to me. She pushed her ass against me hard and I cupped both incredible breasts in my hands. She leaned her head back and I ran my tongue up and down the curve of that neck.

  “You….you… Bill, stop….stop….please…”

  "You really want me to.”

  “For just a moment.”

  I just held her.

  “You told me about your first time…here. My first time was in a condo in Dade County….when I was 15. With a fat, greasy old man holding his fat greasy cock in his hand as he pushed it into me….and my father and three of my brothers held my arms and my legs spread wide and my head back so I couldn’t bite him or spit on him.”

  I froze.

  She swallowed hard.

  “I was a virgin..and he hurt me. He didn’t even try to be gentle. That was part of the $25,000 he had paid my father for the privilege of breaking in a virgin with huge breasts. He wanted the ‘virgin experience.’ He wanted blood.”

  Somewhere I could hear night birds mating or fighting or whatever they might be up to when they should be asleep in their nests. There was a far-away blast of a horn that might have come from a shrimper or trawler.

  ‘I was a freak. I started growing breasts when I was 10. I was a double E cup before I was 14. I was the 10th of 10 children that my father implanted in my mother. I saw a picture of her once, when she was a young girl in Cuba. She was beautiful, like me. And big breasted, but not like me. When I knew her she was sad, and her breasts sagged like sacks of flour. He had beaten and fucked every ounce of life and joy out of her.

  “When I became a woman at 11, my father started letting men pay for the privilege of stripping me. The wealthier were allowed to fondle my breasts, play with my private parts. But never, ever, to break my hyman. He knew what a treasure he had.

  “He and my brothers killed a man who forgot himself and tried to rape me. They cut his throat in front of me and while he begged with what breath he had left, they cut
his genitals off and threw them in a swamp. Then they took him off in a boat, and I never saw or heard of him again.

  “My father told me that if I tried to run away, or fight, or tell anyone, he would cut out my mother’s vagina, cut off her breasts and then toss her into the swamp for the alligators to find. I believed him.

  “When I turned 15, I looked old enough to pass for a young woman, but young enough to appeal to old perverts and pedophiles. That is when he sold me the first time. For the next six months, once a month, for $10,000 or $20,000, he would sell me to rich men for their private use, for parties, or to show off to their friends.

  “We lived in an isolated, swampy area away from the cities and towns. That’s the way my father and brothers wanted it. I had never ridden in an automobile until I was 14. I had never attended school. My mother taught me to read and write without my father being aware of it. When he found out, when I was 13, he beat her so badly she never walked right again. But I didn’t’ need her by that time.

  “My brothers would bring me books and magazines without my father’s knowledge, if I pleased them using my hands or mouth. And then, when he was bringing me back in a van from his latest assignment, I came home and found that my mother had died. Oh, he and my brothers said she had had a stroke. Simply dropped dead one day while at the stove cooking their supper.”

  “He came to me that night. Since he was using me, I guess he decided there was no reason he couldn’t sample what he was selling. But mother was dead. As he came to me, I stabbed him with a butcher knife and when he went down stabbed him in the groin, through his balls. And before my brothers could reach me, I took a pistol from his private hiding place and shot the first two that came into his room. ”