interspersed with cloud. Rhys and Kim had no need to leave the farm, so they didn't.
She helped him dip the sheep, taking charge of the pen while he did all the hazardous work with the heavy-duty chemicals, dressed from head to toe in protective overalls.
"Kinky," said Kim when she saw them, a mischievious grin on her face, but Rhys took the sheep-dipping and its potential dangers seriously and he simply shook his head at her and motioned her to keep well back.
She followed him wherever he went, she and Skip flanking him like faithful handmaidens. When they could get Skip to bound off in pursuit of an errant sheep, Rhys would find a suitable stile to bend Kim over, lift whichever shirt of his she was wearing that day, and shag the living daylights out of her. The open air was a strangely powerful aphrodisiac, with its lingering warmth and the smells of nature rich around them.
They found themselves doing it everywhere – piles of cut grass, the hayloft, the combine harvester. Anywhere reasonably clean and safe would do. Just having her, laughing and careless beside him with her sleek tan legs striding out below one of his old rugby shirts, was enough to get him hard. He lost count of how many times and in how many positions they did it over the course of those days. It was as if there were a fever in the air, turning him into some kind of satyr.
Sometimes it took him back to the first years with Hannah, and then he had to stop and put it from his mind.
Kim was a different creature altogether. She seemed formed from the elements and made for sex, a free spirit who had come to release him from his lonely prison for a season. He tried to bear in mind that this couldn't last forever, but as each long summer day merged into another, time itself seemed to stretch out for them.
Hard work, good food, sunshine and lashings of sex – it was the life he had always dreamed of.
In the evenings, they shared a bath, drank a bottle of wine and played some sexually-charged version of chess or Scrabble until their yawns could no longer be contained and he would carry her up to bed.
"Chess," she said, wrinkling her nose with distaste the first night he suggested it. "That's boring."
"Not the way I play it," he insisted .
"What's different about the way you play it?"
"Every time you lose a piece, there's a forfeit."
"Oh yeah?" Her brazen smile showed that she knew what was on his mind. "Good at chess, are you?"
"I'm not bad."
"Well, I'm rubbish. So you'll beat me easily."
"That's what I was counting on, actually. Come on. You be white, I'll be black."
His attack was swiftly mounted and she soon found herself short of pawns.
The forfeits were easy enough at first.
"Take off your shirt."
"Come over here and snog the face off me."
"Show me if you can get your nipple into your mouth."
She managed to take a pawn off him, and made him get on his knees and kiss her toes.
But when the pieces of higher value started to fall, he grew more demanding.
Taking her castle, he looked her slowly up and down, enjoying the way she seemed to hold herself taut under his gaze, waiting for the blow to fall.
"OK," he said softly. "I want you to spread your legs nice and wide, that's it. Show me what you've got."
As she had been, as usual, naked under the shirt, this was easily done. She leant back against the armchair and parted them, watching him with challenge in her eyes, keeping her knees drawn up.
"That's nice," he said. "Now I want you to touch yourself. Show me how you do it."
She looked swiftly over her shoulder, as if to check for observers.
"I think we're alone, love," he said with a chuckle.
"Just in case Skip…" she said.
"She's asleep in the kitchen. You're fine. You won't be corrupting an innocent dog." He nodded, with a deliberately wicked flash of his eyes. "Go on, then."
She was blushing, he noted with satisfaction. He liked to see the colour creeping into her cheeks.
Her frank stare was gone now and she looked down
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