“What’re you doing?” she said with annoyance, frowning at him. “You stopped.”
Teasingly, he said, “Answer the question.”
She pressed the back of her head against the bed and flapped her knees like wings. “I grew up in privilege, and I was bored . . . oh, so fucking bored with debutante balls and the stiff, awkward young males who came courting and not being able to do anything except under the strictest supervision. I wanted adventure! So as soon as I was eighteen, I ran away from home to stake a claim on a new life for myself.”
She cupped her breasts in her hands and stared at him, beseeching. “Will you please continue now, damn you, you fucking barbarian?”
“Tsk, tsk, Miss York. Where did you learn such barn talk?”
“The stable boys.”
“Oh, and what else did you learn from the stable boys?”
She glared at him in exasperation. “That’s none of your business.”
“Miss York, did one of those stable boys steal your virginity?”
“Steal?” She chuckled. “If you stick your finger in my pussy, I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, all right.”
“There, that’s it. Oh, Christ! God, you’re wretched. Where did you learn how to do that?”
“We had an Arapaho house girl back at the old ranch in Texas,” Haskell said, slowly and methodically sliding the tip of his finger around the inside lips of her snatch while she continued to breathe loudly and squeeze her breasts in her hands, kneading them like bread dough. “She taught me everything I know back in the old foreman’s shack behind the main house.”
“I feel I should . . . thank her.”
“What’d the stable boys teach you, Miss York?”
“Nothing like this. I do believe you’ve taken me down another road, but God damn you, Haskell, I’m . . . I’m a professional.” She glared at him over her breasts and her hands, her cobalt blues sparking frustration and rage. “I am not a wanton woman. I’m a professional. I do not disobey the orders of my employer. I do not fornicate with my colleagues!” She frowned. “What on God’s green earth are you doing?”
Haskell, who was as naked as the girl was, had risen onto his knees and was positioning himself and his fully engorged staff between her spread thighs. “We’re gonna fornicate, Miss York.”
She looked down at him, her eyes widening. “Christ, you’re hung like a fucking mule!”
“Ever seen one that size?”
“Only on a mule.”
“Ever fuck a mule, Miss York?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, you’re about to.”
“You can’t stick that thing in me!” Raven watched in grave fascination as he took his big dong in his right hand and slid the large mushroom head through her black bush and between the silky pink folds of her pussy. “Oh, Christ, you’re going to snap me like a wishbone! You’d better not come in me, you bastard! There is no room in my life for a child, and we do not need to bring another one of you into this world, Haskell—oh, you incorrigible animal!”
He was half inside her now, rising up on his toes and his outstretched arms, suspended over her, staring into her eyes, which seemed to be losing focus the deeper he shoved himself inside her. She stretched her lips back from her teeth and placed her hands on each side of his face, raking her thumbs through his heavy, dark brown beard.
“You’re appropriately named,” she whispered, staring up at him now as he slid deeper and deeper inside her. “You’re more animal than man.”
“I take that as a compliment. Never cared much for men. Horses, dogs, even some coyotes and wolves I’ve met—much better than any man I’ve ever run into.”
She chuckled. “Oh, you’re a philosopher, too.”
“Among other things.”
He bottomed out inside her. She winced and pressed her forehead against his chin. She was quivering. At the same time, she wrapped her legs around his lower back and clung to him as though he were keeping her from falling over a steep precipice.
“I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you that you were not a couth man. Oh, Christ, Haskell!” She sucked in a breath. “I knew that you were no man a woman should ever succumb to—a savage—or she’d be sorry she ever did!”
“Just think of me as one of the stable boys,” he said, sliding in and out of her, grunting.
“Oh, God,” she wheezed, arching her back and tipping her head back on her pillow, squeezing her eyes closed. “None of them was hung like you!”
He slid in and out of her slowly. Their long, harsh breaths were in sync.
Occasionally, Raven would groan and look down between them to watch his big dong plundering her, making soft, wet crackling sounds as he raised and lowered his hips. She placed her hands flat against his hairy chest and then moved them up to tug at his ears and his beard or to rake them through his long, thick hair. Then, breathing hard, she would look down between their bellies again at his cock sliding in and out of her, lubricated with her own warm oozings.
Haskell lowered his face to hers. She turned her lips away with a defiant little grunt. He placed his right hand on her chin, holding her face still, and kissed her.
She did not return the kiss but kept her mouth stiff. Continuing to kiss her gently, he massaged her right breast, rolling the nipple between his thumb and index finger. He began sliding in and out of her faster, bucking against her with each descent into her core.
She sucked a sharp breath, opened her mouth with a soft mewl, entangled her tongue with his, and ground her heels into his buttocks.
He placed his hands on both sides of her head and kissed her hungrily, turning his head this way and that, probing her mouth with his tongue in the same way he was invading her pussy with his cock.
She groaned and mewled and grunted deep in her throat, raking her hands almost painfully through his hair and then digging her fingers into his bulging biceps, squeezing.
She pulled her mouth away from his and looked down the long canyon between them. “Oh . . . oh, Christ . . . you’re . . . you’re . . . ! You’re bringing me—ahhh!” She threw her head back as he rose higher on his toes and his outstretched arms and began hammering against her with a blood-boiling fervor.
She hugged him tightly and said over his shoulder. “Oh, fuck—you’re good at this, you bastard. I didn’t ask for this. I want you to know!” She threw her head back on the pillow and lifted her chin, hardening her jaws until the delicate cords stood out on her long, fine neck. “I only wanted to discuss the . . . the . . . the cassssssse!”
She sobbed and squealed.
He could feel her hot honey boiling out of her, her pussy clutching at him like a tiny, hungry hand, her heels grinding into his buttocks, her fingernails digging into his back. At the same time, Haskell felt that his loins were about to burst.
He held back from the precipice of fulfillment just long enough for her sobs and muffled screams to dwindle. When her body began to relax beneath her and her breathing grew less labored, he pulled out of her with a deep grunt and slid his throbbing red cock up fast against her belly.
“Your hands,” he grunted.
“Huh?”
“Use your hands, for chrissakes. Finish me!”
“Oh!”
She lowered her hands between them, wrapped both around his iron-hard cock, and began pumping him. Her hands were soft and warm.
“Harder!” he ordered.
“I am!”
“Harder!”
“Okay!”
She pumped him madly. He slid his cock up higher on her belly, arching his back and squeezing his eyes closed, gritting his teeth until he thought he would grind them to powder. She slid one of her manically pumping hands down to his balls and hefted them, fondled them, and then he gave a bearlike groan and opened his eyes.
He looked do
wn at her. She was smiling delightedly down at his cock and balls in her fast-working hands. The seed erupted and shot up against her chin and across her lips. She laughed and continued to pump. His seed continued to jet out of him, washing across her lips and chin and neck.
When the spasms began to dwindle, the seed spurted across her breasts.
She pumped him more slowly now, her right hand wrapped tightly around his slightly softening member, the other cupping his heavy scrotum. She giggled and scuttled down and closed her mouth over the head of his cock, sucking him, twirling her tongue around him, keeping the fine spasms of desire going until he was finally spent.
He sighed, rolled onto his back beside her. She rolled onto him, massaged his arms with her hands, cooing and squirming. Finally, she lifted her head and used her right arm to sweep her tangled black hair from her face. She kept her other hand wrapped proprietarily around his big, slackening cock.
“Bear?” she said, her voice raspy, her cheeks flushed from fulfillment.
“You’re an animal,” he told her, only just now catching his breath.
“You have to leave now.”
“Hmmm?”
“You have to leave now.”
She rolled to the other side of the bed. She grabbed something off of the nightstand and then sat up against the oak headboard. There was a clicking sound. He looked over at her to see a silver-plated, pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer clenched in her right fist.
She aimed it at him, her eyes desperate, determined. “Now!”
Haskell jerked his head up, ran a hand across his face, and blinked, for half a second wondering if he’d nodded off and was dreaming. “Hold on, now, Raven.”
“Get dressed and get out,” she demanded, wagging the gun at the door. She kept her voice low and taut with menace. “I mean it, Bear. I’ll shoot if you don’t. And it’s Miss York. You are not ever to address me by my given name. I am a professional, and I do not—will not ever again—succumb to the lust of a brutish man. Especially not one who is my colleague.”
She aimed the gun at his broad chest. “I am a professional.”
Her voice cracked a little on that last, and a tear rolled out from the corner of her right eye to dribble down along her long, fine nose.
Haskell studied her, incredulous. Her hair hung down along the sides of her pale, perfectly shaped breasts still slightly red from the chafing of his beard and his callused hands.
“Get out!” she snarled, gritting her teeth and tossing her beautiful head at the door.
“All right, all right,” Haskell said, crawling down off the bed and holding his hands shoulder-high, palms out. “You mind if I get dressed first?”
“Yes, I do mind. Take your clothes and go!” She aimed the gun straight out from her shoulder, narrowing her right eye as she sighted down the barrel, drawing a bead on his heart.
Haskell gave a startled grunt. He’d be damned if she didn’t look serious.
He hot-footed around the room, gathering his clothes from where she’d tossed them after practically tearing them off his body after he’d removed her widow’s weeds with effort, and glanced at her once more, holding the duds and his spurred black boots against his chest.
She was still aiming the gun at him, biting down hard on her lower lip. The look in her eyes, the view of her soft breasts through her tangled tresses, started to give him another hard-on. At the same time, he was touched with apprehension. She was holding the pistol steadily in her clenched fist, keeping that bead tight against his ticker.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off with a hard and fast, “Out, Agent Haskell!”
He fumbled with the doorknob, got the door open, and stumbled into the hall. He pressed his back to the door, blinked, and stared through his own tangled hair hanging in his eyes. “I’ll be damned,” Haskell said, a wistful grin stretching his lips. “The girl fancies me.”
8
Early the next afternoon, Haskell blew a long plume of cigar smoke into the wind rushing by the platform between coach cars. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe flyer he’d hopped, headed for Colorado Springs, was sashaying around the tracks, tapping over the seams, squawking and belching as it chugged up a steep grade in the bright afternoon sunshine.
They’d just taken on water at Castle Rock, and Haskell had gotten off with his saddlebags and rifle to wet his whistle at the little saloon next to the water tank. He’d looked around for his comely partner, but although there’d been only four coach cars on this particular combination, plus one parlor car for drinking and gambling, he hadn’t spied the girl.
Raven must have been in some sort of disguise again, although he’d thought she always traveled in . . .
He let his thoughts trail off as he glanced through the soot-streaked window to his left. He frowned and continued to stare through the glass as he let the smoke from his Cleopatra Federal dribble out his broad nostrils. Finally, he raked the burning coal off the end, stubbed it out with his boot, and stuffed the rest of the stogie into the pocket of his cowhide vest.
He picked up his saddlebags, which he draped over his left shoulder—he had his bear-fur coat roped tightly to the bags, as now in September, it would likely be chilly up along the Continental Divide—and took his Winchester Yellowboy ’66 in his right hand. He fumbled the door open, stopped, and grinned.
He kicked the door closed behind him and strode forward along the aisle, the passengers sitting in twos and threes on either side of him in the straight-backed, green velour bench seats beneath wooden-slatted luggage racks. It was warm enough that several windows were open, and some of the passengers were coughing against the smoke from the Baldwin locomotive’s big, diamond-shaped stack that was slithering into the car, sometimes accompanied by glowing cinders that were known to set folks’ clothes on fire.
Haskell stopped behind the black-haired young woman, dressed all in black, with a prim, square box hat on her head, sitting on the right side of the aisle, her back to him. She sat in the aisle seat, staring straight ahead. No one sat beside her. Even from the back, she had such a chilly set to her shoulders that Bear didn’t wonder why.
He grinned at having finally run the girl down. He saw no reason they couldn’t exchange the briefest of greetings. They were still a long way from their destination, and sometimes old Allan was secretive to the point of schoolboy foolishness.
Haskell crouched down behind the woman and said into her left ear, “Don’t shoot, Miss York, it’s only the stable boy you played house with last . . .”
He let his voice trail off. The woman had turned to him. He jerked his head back in surprise.
It was not Raven’s oval-shaped, perfectly sculpted countenance and deep blue eyes facing him but the face of an old woman in her late fifties, early sixties, with deep crow’s feet around her eyes and mouth and shock and dismay in her pale brown eyes. On the seat beside her, a Rhode Island Red hen clucked through the wicker bars of its cage, regarding Haskell with much the same expression as its owner.
“Sir, would you please!” the matron said.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” Haskell said, tipping his hat to the woman. “Beg your pardon. I thought you were somebody else.”
“Indeed, I am not!”
“I see that.” Bear pinched the brim of his slouch hat. The stark contrast between the girl he’d expected to see and the middle-aged woman he’d actually seen was like a punch to the solar plexus. “My sympathies for your loss.”
“Oh, that old scoundrel wasn’t much of a loss. I donned the weeds for his sister. Just the same, I do not talk to strangers, sir!”
“All right, all right, I understand, and good day to you, ma’am!”
Flushed with embarrassment, Haskell retreated several rows to an empty aisle seat. He stowed his saddlebags and rifle in the overhead rack and glanced at the man sitting beside the window. He was
a gray-bearded old-timer in a shabby bowler hat, and he was chuckling delightedly, obviously having heard Haskell’s brief exchange with the widow.
“I was married to one like that,” the graybeard said. He spoke around his gnarly old hand. “Meaner’n a barrel full o’ snakes. You ask me, her husband’s the lucky one!” The old man laughed, wheezing, and finished up by coughing and wiping spittle from his lips with a soiled red handkerchief.
Haskell sat down beside the oldster and removed his hat to inspect it for burning cinders. He was about to say something about his own devotion to bachelorhood but stopped when a shadow flickered in the upper corner of his right eye.
A half-second later, he thought he heard a slight thump in the pressed-tin ceiling.
He canted his head to his right to get a better look out the window. The train was nearing the top of the pass and slowly picking up speed. Rock escarpments bristling with sparse Ponderosa pines cropped up on both sides of the track, jutting from six to twenty feet above the jerking, stuttering cars.
“Did you see that?” Haskell said, frowning at the pale chunks of granite and limestone glowing in the bright sunlight.
“See what?” the graybeard said, turning to gaze out the window. “What’d you see—eagle, coyote? Bear?”
Haskell looked out the windows on the other side of the car. He couldn’t see anything except the glowing walls of rock relieved by small wedges of shadow and the occasional twisted trunk of a hardy pine.
Apprehension raked cold fingers across the back of his neck.
He rose from his seat, reached up into the luggage rack, and slid his Winchester, its rear walnut stock inlaid with an ivory bear’s head, from his wool-lined saddle scabbard. The rifle had a lanyard and a sling ring set in the brass receiver, and he slung the rifle over his shoulder now as he looked both ways along the coach car, which was about two-thirds full.
He turned and walked along the aisle toward the rear of the car. Only a few people regarded him incredulously. Most were involved in conversations or were sleeping with their hat brims pulled down over their eyes. A couple of cowpunchers were desultorily playing two-handed poker, sitting sideways on their bench seat.
High and Wild Page 6
