It was morning. Jake opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling in his bedroom. Béla hadn’t haunted him last night.

Often, his dreams of Béla were of them making love in the sand, like on the night she revealed to him that she was a vampire.

Sometimes, in his dream, they would be floating in a bright white room, swimming through the air doing silly summersaults and making love in crazy, impossible positions.

A couple of times, several years ago, they were floating in a vast chamber with the ground a hundred miles beneath them. The ground bent impossibly around them to become a green and brown sky, a hundred miles above. They floated in the center of this amazing wonderland, gazing into each other’s eyes as they touched.

Each time he dreamed, it was as real as though she had actually come back to him. Each time, the emptiness of the following morning was almost unbearable.

After her death, Jake occasionally had dreams that included Béla in them. Most of the dreams were set in the distant past, and Béla was called by other names when people spoke to her. He believed that somehow, he was seeing actual events that had somehow been trapped in his subconscious when she had shared her sensations with him during their lovemaking, although not all of his dreams of her were of a sensual nature. Several were disturbingly violent, and he was sad that she’d experienced the cruel side of humanity during her journey through the ages.

Four years ago, new dreams began where she seemed to be actively seeking him out. He had been tortured with them almost nightly for the next two and a half years. Then, for several months, she left him completely alone. But for the last several months, he had been dreaming of her almost nightly.

Often, the dreams included another ghostly, dark haired girl whom he thought of as Béla’s sister, although he hadn’t known about any sister when she’d been alive. The only time the dreams didn’t come was when there was a real live girl sharing his bed. It was almost as if Béla’s ghost respected his privacy.

He could feel Alicia under the sheet, kissing his belly and teasing him with her fingers. In a moment, he would feel her hot mouth on him. A few moments after that, she would be riding on top of him with her eyes closed, her back arched and her head thrown back, temporarily abandoning her sorrows to the ecstasy she was experiencing.

The progression of activity unfolded as Jake expected it to. Her lovemaking techniques hadn’t changed much in the last seventy years. As she rode him, he held onto her breasts, pleasantly keeping them from flopping around wildly as she bounced up and down.

She looked stunning, her unkempt blond hair wildly surrounding and half covering her face as she rode him. Her eyes were closed; her face displaying the sensations of orgasmic ecstasy. Her body was well toned, but still soft and feminine. It jiggled in all the right places.

‘She could have been a dancer,’ Jake thought, ‘like her mother.’

He continued to admire her ample form as she repeatedly impaled herself on his cock. The warm aliveness of her insides felt as wonderful as she looked.

Suddenly, she straightened her legs out behind her and leaned heavily against his hands, pressing her breasts into them with all of her weight.

“Oh, Oh, Shit! Fuck!” She gasped through gritted teeth. “Goddam Fucking Cramp!”

She landed ungracefully on top of him, her ragged breath hot against his neck. She was pissed that her out-of-shape leg muscles had betrayed her and stolen her orgasm. She held her cramping leg straight out behind her, whimpering as she painfully forced the bunched-up muscles in her thigh to straighten out. After a moment, she relaxed on top of him.

Jake was still rock-hard and was actually enjoying the way Alicia’s pussy clenched against his cock as she forced the cramp out of her leg. After she was more relaxed, he wrapped his arms around her, firmly grabbing her ass cheeks and began slowly thrusting his cock up into her wet little cunt, placating her.

She moaned softly into his ear, letting him know that she really appreciated what she was, once again, feeling down there. After a moment, she timidly started thrusting her hips against his, soon matching him move for move as she happily noticed her leg cramp not recurring.

Jake kept his arms wrapped around Alicia, enjoying the sensual movement of her body as she quietly humped her pelvis against his. After a moment, he felt her muscles tighten as she came.
He made one final thrust into her and sprayed her insides with his cum. He knew if he didn’t do it then, she wasn’t going to finish him off. Once Alicia came, she was done with fucking until she was horny, again.

This time, she surprised him, staying on top of him and letting him stay inside of her. The juices from their lovemaking slowly leaked out of her and down around his balls, continuing on down the crack of his ass, making him want to squirm. She rested on top of him holding herself up with her elbows and forearms pressed into his chest. She gazed into his face, her expression unreadable.

“Before I leave here, I’m going to be pregnant,” she said, smiling sweetly into his face. “My period starts in a few days, and my body monitor tells me I’m fertile. I’m not worried about if I get pregnant – I’m a regular baby factory.”

Jake just lay there, stunned, and thought about what she’d just told him. She watched as he decided what to say. He knew that for Alicia, Alicia always came first (no joke intended). That was one of the main reasons he didn’t love her. She loved herself enough for the both of them. He had actually been surprised that she hadn’t tried to trap him into marriage with a pregnancy when she was twenty. If she had, he calculated, their love child would be…

‘I have an older daughter you’ve never met. She’ll be sixty-four next week. She looks exactly like Mom and me.’

Astonished at his sudden realization, Jake stared wide-eyed into Alicia’s sweetly smiling face. She kissed him on his nose.

“She’s coming out next week to celebrate her birthday,” Alicia told him as he lay, stunned, beneath her. “She finally wants to meet her real dad.”

‘I have a kid!’ Jake thought to himself, astounded. ‘I’m a father!’

“I’m a father?” he asked, looking over at Alicia as she slid off the bed, heading for the bathroom.
“Well, you’ve never been her father,” Alicia said, somewhat coldly, “as least not from her point of view, but, technically, you’re also a great grandfather. You have three grandsons, two granddaughters, and, let’s see…”

She thought furiously, pretending she’d forgotten how many offspring her oldest daughter had. “… five great grandsons and eight great granddaughters!”

She blew him a kiss and disappeared through the bathroom door.

‘Wow! She’s been busy!’ Jake thought, astounded. ‘She really is a baby factory!’

‘Wait a minute… That was just from one daughter,’ Jake realized. ‘Alicia herself is eighty-six. How many children has she had that she calls herself a baby factory?’

Back in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a ‘Baby Factory’ was a girl who got pregnant every time she had sex.

‘She’s had more than one child with me!’ he realized. ‘And she’s working on number three!’

“Alicia!” Jake shouted, storming into the bathroom. “Did you get pregnant the last time we were together?”

Alicia told the shower to stop and turned toward him, her magnificent wet body glistening in the morning sunlight shining through the wall.

“Of course not!” she said, sounding offended. “I was here with my husband.”

Jake knew that she was perfectly capable of understanding exactly what he meant. She was playing with him – fucking over his mind!

“No!” He said angrily. “I mean thirty years ago, when you were here!”

“This is only the second time I’ve been here, Uncle Jake,” she told him, innocently. She actually sounded confused. “Are you all right?”

“God dammit, you know what I mean!”

Jake was frustrated. She was so good at manipulating him. He had just discovered she’d been doing it all of her adult life.

“Do I have another child?” he asked her, point blank, tightly controlling his temper.

“How many do you think you have?” she asked him. “Toss me a towel or something, will you? I’m getting cold.”

He threw her a terry cloth towel. She pretended to pat herself dry with it while drawing his attention even more to her luscious, glistening wet figure.

“Just answer the question,” Jake said, more quietly than before. “Please?”

“What was the question?” she asked, unmercifully twisting the knife in his mind.

“When you. And I. Were together. Thirty years ago.” Jake said, pointedly controlling his temper. “Did you get pregnant?”

“Oh, that question,” Alicia said.

Then she blew him a kiss and threw the towel at him. She turned and stepped back into the shower stall.

“No, it was twenty-six years ago. I know, because he’s twenty-five, now,” she said. “Shower on, please.”

The twin showerheads began spinning around, spraying her with steamy, hot water and moving, once again, up and down, gently massaging her glisteningly beautiful, well-formed and very alluring naked body.

“I named him after you, you know…” he heard her call out over the noise of the shower spray.

Numb, Jake stood in the bathroom doorway and watched her shower. She actually admitted she had another child by him twenty-five years ago.

There had been an undercurrent of tension between Alicia and her parents when they’d visited last year. Jake figured it was a family problem between them, and ignored it and the occasional odd bits of communication that occurred between her and her parents. He thought they were rude to bring their family problems with them, but he liked his adopted family enough to forgive them for it.

Now he understood that Frank and Tanya had brought Alicia with them with the intention that she was to tell ‘Uncle’ Jake that he was a father. Since nobody told him at that time, it was evident that Frank and Tanya had decided to leave it up to Alicia to ‘dig her own grave’, so to speak. They didn’t want to be the ones to destroy Jake’s relationship with their oldest daughter. Alicia had called their bluff and won. They didn’t have the guts to rat her out.

Jake now realized that Alicia was actually building the family dynasty of long-lifers that she’d envisioned when she met him. She hadn’t let a little thing like good old Uncle Jake not wanting to marry her get in the way. Once she was carrying his child, she had let him go, until she was ready for the next one.

Now that Jake was retired, and Alicia was widowed once more, she had evidently decided to lay all her cards on the table and make one last play for him – winner take all. And it looked like she had enlisted her oldest daughter’s help to win him over. His daughter!

When Alicia finished her drying cycle, she stepped down from the shower stall and went into the bedroom. Uncle Jake wasn’t there. Opening her travel bag, she pulled out and put on her favorite puce wrap made from real transparent Chinese silk and trotted downstairs, still barefoot, and barely covered.

The sun was already high in the mid-morning sky and the house had drawn the shades across its southern exposure. Filtered sunlight, reflected from the collector on the roof, cheerfully diffused itself across the living room and kitchen.

Spotting the console on the wall, Alicia walked over to it and made sure it was operating. She knew Uncle Jake wasn’t wild about tech stuff and tended to ignore it now that he didn’t need it for his livelihood.

“Locate Jake, please,” Alicia said to the console.

A square opened in the wall showing a map of the area around them. Alicia easily understood its layout showing where the cabin was. The display around the moving dot representing Jake indicated he was traveling at Mach II, heading north. He was already halfway to Bozeman.

‘He left! Crap! I told Father this would happen!’

“Give me a line to Jake, please,” Alicia asked the console.

‘Line open…’ printed out on the display. Jake had the console’s voice turned off.

“Uncle Jake?” she said, into the console. “Uncle Jake?

“I know you can hear me. Please come back,” she said.

‘Receiver disconnected…’ printed out on the display.

‘Damn!’ she fumed. ‘He’s going home. To his old home, to work things out in his head. Uncle Jake is so damned stubborn at times. And his thinking process takes forever.’

Well, she had the whole place to herself. She hated being alone, but if she had to be alone, this was a nice place to suffer with it. She really liked Uncle Jake’s taste in designing this little retreat.

‘I really do hope you can forgive me for what I’ve done, Uncle Jake,’ she thought to herself. ‘I had hoped you would let me stay with you for awhile.’

She knew, from Uncle Jake’s reaction, that her chances she would win this weren’t very good. But she had promised her father she would tell him straight out, and she had done that, even though she privately believed that that was the wrong way to handle her adopted uncle.

Alicia was much better at playing the grieving widow. Uncle Jake was such a hopeless romantic that she really enjoyed letting him feel like he was helping her through her emotional crises. That was something in common they could use to relate to each other – lost loved ones. Lost loves and their long lives were really the only things they had in common, even though she believed her real lost love was Uncle Jake.

Alicia also realized that Uncle Jake wouldn’t actually make a very good companion. He spent most of his time dwelling on the past and was a slow thinker. Alicia’s mind operated on many different levels, solving the problems she put to it efficiently and without giving any quarter. She had a good mind for business and she knew it.

Her self-appointed life-long task was setting up a family dynasty with herself as the matriarch. (Technically, her mother would be the matriarch, but Alicia would be running the thing.) She already had a good start, with a half dozen children from each of her two marriages.

She had dazzled her rich, powerful, potential mates with her wit, intelligence and natural beauty and won them over both times, becoming the perfect trophy wife. Her social manners were impeccable, as she had hired the best people to teach her exactly what she needed to know and exactly how to behave in high society. She knew better than to upstage the wives of the established movers and shakers in the political and business worlds, and often made herself a valued ally against newly arriving upstarts. She had been very careful to avoid that label, herself, by not rocking the rank and status boat. She was never an embarrassment to either of her husbands, and kept them happy in bed, getting pregnant as often as she could in order to expand her dynasty.

She was currently the matriarch of two powerful families that totaled over seventy individuals and owned controlling interest in several major industries. The oldest child in each family was a long-lifer like herself, unknowingly sired by Uncle Jake. They were her lieutenants and acted as her proxy. They both knew the truth about who their real father was and their genetic legacy. They shared their mother’s ambition and supported her efforts to increase the family’s fortune and influence.

She needed one more family fortune in one more industry to win her, or one of her special children, a seat on the Supreme Board of Directors. She wasn’t worried about not being able to get another child from Uncle Jake. According to her body monitor, she was already pregnant and had been for several hours.

What she needed to do now that Jake had fled was to give up this childhood fantasy about winning over Uncle Jake and get busy with that third potential husband. Her romantic dreams about Uncle Jake would just get in the way. After she’s created her three-pronged power structure and her next husband has died off, there would be time enough for Uncle Jake.

She already had her third husband picked out and won over. When her second husband died, she had told her potential suitor, a close friend she had been grooming for the last couple of years, that she wanted to be alone for a few weeks, to grieve in private. He had respected her wishes and told her he was willing to wait for her forever, if it took that long. She hadn’t even had to be unfaithful to win him over. She was proud of the fact that, during the times she was actually married to her husbands, she had never strayed from them. That was also one reason why her next husband wanted her so badly.

Alicia had been pacing through the cabin while she worked things out in her head. Now that she’d made up her mind, there were only two, no, three things left to do. She dropped down on the couch.

“Line out, please,” she said into the air. A console rose up out of the arm of the couch. She punched in a series of numbers.

“Priority – Family,” she said to the console. Frank’s face appeared on the monitor.

“Hi, Daddy,” Alicia said.

“Hi, Baby,” Frank said. “How did it go? Did you tell him?”

Alicia sighed and looked sadly into the console. “I told him; he left me.”

“Well,” her father said, “we knew that could happen…”

“I’m going back to Boston,” Alicia said. “If Jackie still wants to meet her father…”

“I’ll take care of it, Baby,” her father told her.

He blew her a kiss. Alicia puckered her lips back at him. The monitor went dark.

“Computer line out,” Alicia said to the console.

A keyboard appeared on the monitor. She punched in the codes to bring up her next husband’s evening itinerary. He had potential reservations for a different restaurant every night for the next month. Each reservation was for a single person, only. That was his way of letting her choose when she wanted to reenter his social life.

She added her name to the reservation for tonight and pressed ‘Confirm Reservation’. She knew he would receive a copy of the confirmation in just a few minutes. It was time to get on with her life.

“Close console,” she said as she rose from the couch and trotted up the stairs to dress and bring down her luggage. The efficient little console disappeared back into the arm of the couch.

In a few minutes, she came back down the stairs dressed in her tight-fitting, special-tailored red flight suit. If her next husband met her when she arrived, this sexy outfit was what he would see her wearing. She manhandled the three bags Uncle Jake had taken upstairs over to the front door of the cabin.

There was only one thing left to do. She walked over to the wall console and stood for a moment, taking a couple of deep breaths to steady her voice. These older models were sometimes fussy about voice tone and modulation.

“Sequence. Begin time, five minutes,” she said and waited for the display to respond. When it did, she continued.

“One. Secure premises until Jake’s return.

“Two. Delete voice recognition sequence Alicia.” She looked at the display.

Sequence. Begin in 4:47 minutes.
1. Security lockdown 1A
2. Delete VR Alicia. Unable to comply. Please enter admin code.

“What? Just do it!” Alicia said, angrily.

She realized that deleting her own voice code from Uncle Jake’s console was just a tiny bandage attempt to make up for the huge rift she’d just created in their relationship, but it was the only thing she could do right now. And that stupid computer wasn’t going to let her do even that.

‘Admin Code Confirmed,’ the console printed across the screen.

‘Really?’ Alicia thought to herself, laughing out loud. ‘Uncle Jake’s admin password is ‘What? Just Do It?’ ‘

Her realization confirmed what she already believed about Uncle Jake’s relationship with modern technology.

“End sequence,” she said, when she had her voice under enough control to say it smoothly.

She looked at the display. She had a little over three minutes to get out or get locked in. She walked over to the door and picked up her bags. The door opened and a brisk desert wind struck her, drying her face and hands as she walked across the sand to her little flitter. As she closed the luggage carrier, she looked toward the cabin. It was sealing itself shut.

‘Damn. I forgot to eat something,’ she realized. ‘Too late now. Oh, well, I’ve got a dinner date in five hours. I’ll live ’til then…’

The cabin recorded Alicia’s ramjet rising into the air and turning east, tracking it until it had left the cabin’s range and transferring the data to the console in Jake’s flyer as he requested.

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