Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Mastering Melanie
By Reese Gabriel
ISBN 13: 978-1-936173-15-0
ISBN 10: 1-936173-15-8
A Pink Flamingo Ebook Publication
Copyright © 2006, All rights reserved
Chapter One
Melanie screamed as the masked riders thundered past the window of the stagecoach. There were three of them, pistols drawn. A moment later she heard gunshots as the vehicle lurched to a halt in the middle of the dusty, dirt road. The momentum threw her forward, onto the opposing row of unoccupied seats. Before she could straighten herself, one of the robbers burst through the coach door, his Colt .45 pointed at her temple.
“Get up, little lady,” the invader announced from behind his tightly drawn bandanna. “This here’s a robbery.”
“Let go of me!” she cried, utterly helpless as the ruffian hauled her down the steps, throwing her into the arms of a second masked man, tall and broad shouldered, wearing a black cowboy hat, leather vest and chaps.
The man laughed as he passed her off to a third, a short fellow with a yellow bandanna and a bowler hat. This one decided to keep her, turning her about so she was firmly in his grasp from behind.
“Give us your valuables,” ordered the first man, the one who’d pulled her from the coach. She winced at the presence of him so close to her delicate face; he was foul smelling, with an eye patch and a tall, rounded hat of the sort Melanie was fairly certain her uncle had told her was called a ten gallon. It was hard to remember. He’d had to teach her so much about the Wild West, and in such a short period of time. As it was, she had barely gotten out of the city in time.
“Please, sir,” she cried. “I have nothing of value. I’m a penniless maiden on my way to Big Rock to serve as the new school marm.”
The man snickered behind his greasy red bandanna. “You hear that boys? The lady’s headin’ for a posting in Big Rock.”
They all started laughing as they cast significant looks in each other’s direction. Was there something about the town she didn’t know?
“A posting?” howled the tall one. “Yea, they got plenty of them out in Big Cock—I mean Big Rock.”
“Yes, I’ll bet there’s plenty you can teach them in Big Cock—on your back that is!”
Melanie flushed red. Uncle Martin had warned her of the coarseness of men in the west, but this was more than any lady could bear. “Have mercy, sirs. Can you not show some civility to a lady of breeding? One who belongs to the family of—”
She stopped herself just in time. She’d been about to reveal her lineage, forgetting that the whole reason she was out here in the middle of this cactus filled, rock strewn desert wasteland was to hide her identity and secure a fresh start, free of the legal entanglements which had nearly ended her up on the hangman’s noose in New York.
“Family of what? Whores?” The one with the eye patch supplied. He nodded now to the one holding her. Without warning, hands reached round and ripped open her black silk traveling jacket. Melanie gasped, for now she had only the white silk blouse and camisole to protect her creamy, well-shaped breasts.
“No. That’s not true!” she cried, trying to free herself. A fugitive she might be, but she was no lady of the evening. As to her false identity (she was traveling as Melanie Jones, a middle class teacher) it was a fact born of necessity, designed to protect her from unjust prosecution in New York.
“The hell it ain’t.” Small grubby hands pawed her breasts through the material. Melanie commenced to squirming, but quickly realized her actions were only serving to stiffen her abused nipples. It was a shameful thing, but not unexpected. Though a virgin, just twenty-two years old, Melanie was a woman of strong passions. Many were the boys and men who’d sought to woo the curvaceous, blue-eyed blonde in hopes of winning her for their very own, and yet she’d held out.
Cavanaugh Reinhart III, until recently her fiancée, had sought more than her kisses and when she refused his advances he had visited upon her the nightmare of her life. It was his fault that she was here now, her once comfortable life in the city ruined forever.
“You know,” the one eyed man said, “I believe you’re right. You ain’t no whore.”
Melanie did not care one bit for his tone of voice. Nor did she like it when he cocked the trigger of his nasty black revolver and shoved it to her lips.
“Cause a whore’ll do a man for money, but, little lady, you’re about to do us all for free. How do you like that idea?”
Melanie swung her head away only to have him bring it back round with the tip of the gun barrel pressed to her cheek.
“I asked you a question,” he menaced, pushing the gun to her mouth. “I said how do you like it?”
She accepted the gun between her trembling lips. “I–I don’t like it,” she managed to say, the words wrapping round the slender yet deadly barrel.
“Boss,” said the little man, his equally foul breath hot on her neck. “Want me to get at them titties for you?”
“No. Let her go. She’ll do it for us. Then she’ll lay her fine, uppity body down on the ground and spread it for us. Isn’t that right? Unbutton your blouse, sweetheart.” He grinned at her lasciviously. His good eye was cold and probing, his voice dark and brittle, belying the term of endearment he’d just employed.
Melanie felt the hot tears spring from her eyes. No one was holding her now, but there were still the three of them, with guns, strong nasty men, eyes intent like wolves. Numbly, her fingers rose to do the man’s bidding. What choice did she have? The tiny pearl buttons felt smooth on her fingers. One by one they yielded. It was ironic, really, that she’d picked this particular outfit for its conservative bent– the long black skirt and severe jacket with high button shoes and a simple, unadorned blouse. She might as well have worn one of her dazzling and risqué gowns from back home considering how she was being treated as a mere sexual object.
“Take it off,” he commanded when she had undone the final button.
Melanie began to tremor as she tugged at the edges of the blouse, pulling the halves apart. She hesitated for a brief second, not wanting to shrug the material off her shoulders. The motion would surely cause her bosom to swell in a most unseemly way.
“Do it,” he warned, aiming the pistol at her camisole-covered belly.
Melanie let her blouse fall to the hard, dry ground. There was a light breeze, and she could feel the waft of it on her sensitive nipples.
“Take that hat off. Let down your hair.”
The man’s one good pupil was dilated. His voice was husky. It seemed like a dream, the way her fingers went to her head, unpinning the small, elegantly pointed hat. She’d trussed her long gold locks up elegantly this morning, so that the cascades of sun-beamed curls hung only partially, but exquisitely down her neck. Melanie felt oddly naked with it down, hanging to the middle of her back. Her unadorned hair was a sight no man had seen, even her uncle, the man who’d raised her since her parents’ untimely death shortly after her fourth birthday.
The man let out a little grunt of satisfaction. “Put them hands up in your hair, now. Rub ‘em around good.”
Melanie looked with disgust at the man’s crotch. He was massaging his very prominent erection through the material. So it
was true then, they were intending to rape her.
She drew a sharp breath as she touched her own soft hair, her fingers wrapping round the silky strands. It was such an intimate gesture, so wildly inappropriate for this evil and foul setting.
“That’s it,” he crooned, yanking down his bandanna and licking his lips. “Show us how bad you want it.”
Melanie closed her eyes against the sight of his pock marked face. Cavanaugh would have loved to see this, she thought sardonically. The proud and aloof Melanie Hawthorne, purported tease and temptress of the highest order, about to get her due. About to give to these three despicable criminals the favors she would not grant to him. A shudder passed through her body. She was sickened, of course, but there was something else, too. An expectation, a tingling, almost as if her body was seeking out the very treatment she so dreaded.
Cavanaugh’s words came to her now, whisky sodden in the back of her mind. You want it, Melanie. Every woman does. The more you protest, it only just shows how badly you need for a man to be strong enough to stamp his will upon you and make you feel the pleasure that comes from shame.
“No!” she cried, a sudden flash of reality overtaking her dream-like state. “You mustn’t! In the name of all that is holy— ”
The one eyed man growled, cocking the trigger to show he meant business. “Hands back on your head, bitch, or you’ll be pushing up daisies.”
Melanie whimpered as he pressed the barrel to the center of her breast, flattening the nipple painfully. As though bound there, she laced her fingers once more in her damp, tousled hair.
Her tormenter laughed devilishly. Smelling her fear and capitulation, he shoved the pistol back into her mouth, deeper than ever, the gun sight bruising the roof of her mouth. “Start sucking, honey pie. You’ll need the practice.”
“Don’t,” she begged, her voice an imprisoned, garbled gasp. “Don’t make me—”
But he did make her, even as his free hand crept up past her stomach, kneading her mounds through the thin camisole material. Her protests reduced to loud gurgling noises, Melanie closed her eyes, reconciling herself to what she knew would be her inevitable rape and murder. Again, it was the irony that struck her. To have traded a certain, though unmerited trip to the gallows in New York for a sodomizing colt revolver and an eventual bullet to the head in the middle of the territories was too rich—precisely the sort of macabre, anti-morality story she and her rebellious young friends were so fond of telling at parties.
“Just remember who you are,” kindly, white bearded Uncle Martin had encouraged her, his face sick with fear and worry as he put her on the early morning train to St. Louis just two days ago, “and you’ll make it through anything.”
Melanie clenched her eyes tightly shut, her mouth obediently servicing the cold, steel rod. Though she fought to deny it in her heart, she knew he was treating the weapon as a man’s member, the way a whore would a cock if she were given it to suck. The very thought of it gave her an odd thrill and made her feel a most peculiar warmth at the juncture of her thighs even as her head continued to bob up and down on this horrid device, which, with the most minor of applications, could end her life in a split second.
“Bet you’d like to take my gun between your legs, too, wouldn’t you, slut?”
Melanie tried to shake her head ‘no,’ ineffectually. If she could, she’d deny it and yet she knew the words would ring false. Already the one eyed man’s hand was up her thigh, under the skirt, traveling beneath the layers of under silk. Any moment he would find the top of her bloomers and from there, he’d reach her sexual center.
Warm and wet and all too willing.
“Spread your legs,” he snapped as the other two gathered closer, bandannas pulled down, their faces intent on what their boss was doing. “Wider. And put your hands on your titties, too. Make ‘em nice and hot for us.”
Melanie obeyed, surrendering herself to the inevitable. It was time for her surrender, and they all knew it. Time for her assault, time for her martyrdom at the hands of these ignorant, power hungry men. Thinking of the saints whom she’d learned from her various religious classes, the women who’d suffered and died for virtue, Melanie readied herself.
A moan escaped her violated throat as she felt the swelling in her breasts, the tight hot pulling between her legs. It would be her body, she vowed, and her body alone which they would have. Her heart and soul would be intact, untouched, no matter what. Looking her assailant clean in the eye, refusing to evade, she gasped as his fist clenched the waistband of her skirt. Grinning, he poised at the brink, on the verge of tearing away her modesty. After that would come her undergarments and then she would be naked.
“I’m gonna do you nice and slow,” he told her. “Then my boys are gonna do you, too.” He reached for her face now, stroking her trembling cheek with his thick, dirty fingers. “Then we’re gonna start all over again. It’ll be sundown before we’re done. Ain’t that right, boys?”
“Actually, I’d say you’re done right now.”
Melanie tuned her ears to the newcomer’s voice even as the three men jumped simultaneously in terror. Was it an angel, sent to deliver her? Not quite. Looking beyond her would-be rapists, she saw a lone man, on horseback, wearing a black hat and boots with a long black, dust-covered riding coat. Sitting calmly in his saddle, he had his hands on the reigns like he had all the time in the world. His face was expressionless, his eyes like a bird of prey.
Melanie drew a ragged breath. He was a vision of raw power, materialized out of thin air. Where on earth had he come from?
After a moment of thick, eerie tension, the one eyed man darted behind Melanie, grabbing her so he could put the gun to her head. “Like hell, mister,” he snarled, hugging her tight. “You drop your weapons right now, or the little teacher gets it. Pow. Right in her pretty little chin.”
Grabbing a fistful of golden yellow tresses, the man bent Melanie’s head back, putting the gun into just the right position to carry out his threat. Melanie shrieked, the sound of her voice muffled by the man’s hand over her mouth.
The rider narrowed his gaze, almost imperceptibly. “This is your last warning,” he told the three men, his voice strangely calm as he flipped aside the left flap of his coat to reveal a pearl handled revolver, the polished metal gleaming silver in a thickly stitched black leather holster.
“Zeke!” The short one shouted to the one eyed man, with panic written all over his face. “What you want us to do?”
He and the other were aiming their guns right at the rider’s head, though their hands were trembling like they were pointing pea shooters at an irritated bull elephant.
“What do I want you to do?” Zeke sputtered. “You dadburned idiots! I want you to kill him, that’s what! Do I have to do everything myself?”
Melanie never even saw the stranger draw. One second Zeke was squeezing her waist, leaning into her back and trying to get a shot off and the next he was letting go, slipping to the ground at her feet. The other two followed suit. A total of three shots had been fired, all by the stranger. One bullet for each of the men now lying dead on the ground.
“You hurt, ma’am?’ the rider asked, re-holstering the pearl handled revolver as though nothing had happened.
“N–no,” she stammered, fighting a sudden weakness in the knees and stomach as she struggled to cover her ill disguised bosom. “But–but who are you?”
The man said nothing as he removed the long black coat, revealing a leather vest beneath it. There was a star pinned to it, a silver one inside of a circle. Melanie felt the blood drain from her face. The deadly stranger was a lawman—the only sort of person Melanie dreaded more than robbers. What would she do now? Uncle Martin had promised her there wouldn’t be any out here in the territories.
“The name’s Trenton Cole,” he replied at last, tossing her the coat to cover herself with. “United States Marshal. My friends call me Trent.”
He tipped his hat, a black Stetson. Melanie swallowe
d hard, resisting the urge to faint. Her handsome rescuer, the square jawed, gray-eyed cowboy was the enemy. An agent of the United States government, sworn to uphold the law and apprehend wrong doers and fugitives from justice.
She forced herself to smile politely, wrapping the coat about her shoulders. It smelled of tobacco, musk and the sweat of a strong man. “I’m much obliged to you, sir.”
He bowed his head, very slightly. “I didn’t catch your name.”
Melanie bit her lip. As gallant as the marshal was being, she couldn’t let herself forget for a moment that he was a stone killer who’d just gunned down three desperadoes without batting an eyelash. What would he do, she wondered, if he learned she too had a price on her head?
“Melanie,” she said evenly. “Miss Melanie...Jones. I’m to be a teacher at the community school in Big Rock.”
Trent Cole’s forehead wrinkled noticeably.
Well, she thought, this was an improvement; at least the marshal wasn’t guffawing like the others had when she’d told them about her new job.
“Big Rock, you say?” He pushed the Stetson back on his head, revealing glimpses of rich, black hair. A perfect compliment, she noted, to the shimmering gray eyes. Hawk’s eyes, they were, mesmerizing, measuring. “That surprises me, given everything that’s going on.”
“You mean the robbers?” she offered helpfully, trying not to feel like some tiny bit of prey about to be devoured in the apparently infamous and obscene Big Cock.
“No, ma’am. I mean Indian troubles. Most of the families in Big Rock have been sent back to Fort Collins till it all blows over. Seems to me that’s where you belong as well.”
Melanie sought to hide her terror. A military fort was the last place she wanted to be trapped right now. She’d as soon take her chances on the open plains with the savages. “It’s all been arranged,” she said, trying not to appear too anxious. “By my uncle in New York.”
The marshal drew back the left corner of his lip very slightly. The polite, neutral expression remained, but there was more intensity in the gaze, something in the brow that indicated he was making calculations, evaluating her words, her gestures, everything about her. “You’re not married,” he observed, noting her wringing, perspiration soaked hands.
Mastering Melanie Page 1
