Just then, another female voice rose from the barred window to his right. “Haskell?”
This female voice was familiar. Before he’d even put a face to it, he felt as though a warm, gentle hand had wrapped itself around his scrotum.
“Raven?”
“You damn fool!” she hissed.
Haskell rose despite his pounding head and stepped back to where he could get a better look out the window. But there was no one there. Footsteps sounded just outside the wall behind him.
Raven stepped back away from the jailhouse window and strode along the wall toward the sheriff office’s front veranda. She wore an amiable smile on her ruby-red lips beneath the brim of her feathered picture hat, but under that cool veneer, the raven-haired beauty was seething.
The damn fool—as she hadn’t been able to help so correctly hissing at her partner and colleague through the jailhouse window, although she knew she was going against the orders of Mr. Pinkerton himself—seemed bound and determined to undermine the integrity of his and her mission here in Wendigo.
Raven’s stagecoach had pulled into town the day before. She’d taken a room in the Sawatch House Hotel, and, having heard less than a half hour ago the familiar, thundering voice echoing around the main drinking hall, she’d slipped out of her room and onto the balcony to gaze down into the saloon, where Bear Haskell himself was doing his best imitation of . . . of what exactly she couldn’t imagine!
A raging moron who needed to be locked up in the nearest asylum?
What on God’s green earth could the man have been thinking to have made such a stupid error, striding into the most elegant establishment in town—although that admittedly wasn’t saying much—and not only to track dung on a new carpet but to start shouting the name of the man whom he and Raven had been assigned to look for and then, on top of that, start beating people up!
They were investigating the whereabouts of a man who had gone missing under what appeared to be very suspicious circumstances, and that sort of investigation required subterfuge.
As Raven had gazed in shock and horror at her partner doing his best to lay waste to the Sawatch House Saloon, she’d begun to wonder if Mr. Pinkerton wasn’t blind to Haskell’s weaknesses—namely, his inability to think coherently or rationally and to carry himself with any delicacy whatsoever.
Why, everywhere the man went, he was a bull in a china shop. That might work when one was dealing with stock thieves or bank robbers—as it had sort of worked on the train from Denver, although the big fool would be dead as a doornail if it hadn’t been for Raven’s intervention—but in situations where one was looking for a missing person, one had to blend in with the missing person’s environment for a time.
She—or he—had to gain the trust of those who might know something about the person whose fate she—or he—was investigating. Once the investigator had gained that trust and had somewhat blended into that particular environment, then and only then did she start probing with a little more confidence and daring, although even then, you didn’t track mule shit into an elegant watering hole and knock about like a bull in the parson’s pantry!
Fool . . .
Well, here Raven was, risking her cover for him, although she’d planned this little visit with the sheriff when she’d first arrived in town. Now, however, she would add another, possibly dangerous little task to her current mission, one that might very well ignite the man’s suspicion.
Haskell.
Raven ground her molars against the way the image of Bear Haskell affected her down below her belly. The brief remembered vision of him straining on top of her, hammering that gigantic rod of his between her legs, powerfully yet tenderly. Him scrubbing his beard and the warmth of his lips across her breasts . . .
There was a loud, wooden scrape, and Raven suddenly realized that the sheriff’s door had opened in front of her. She’d stopped herself just before she’d automatically, instinctively flexed the spring slide beneath her right puffy sleeve and dropped an ivory-gripped derringer down into the palm of her hand.
She blinked, composing herself, hoping the flush from the memory of hers and Haskell’s toil had receded from her cheeks, although she could still feel the tingling in her belly.
A tall man—not as tall as Haskell himself and older but handsome just the same—was standing in the open doorway. He wore a sheriff’s star pinned to the brocade vest beneath his black frock coat.
“Holy shi—” the man said, catching himself. “I mean, uh, hello there.”
He doffed his hat and held it over his chest.
“Hello, there, uh, Sheriff . . .”
“Goodthunder. Sheriff Goodthunder it is, Miss . . .”
“York. Raven York.” She extended her hand to the man, who took it in his own right hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
He appeared to start to lower his head to it, as though to kiss it, but then something stopped him, as though he suddenly felt like a fish out of water, and, flushing slightly, although he did not look like a man accustomed to being embarrassed, he raised his head and released her hand.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss York.” Goodthunder looked around behind Raven, as though looking for a male escort or a female chaperone, and said, “You’re alone?”
“Oh, yes. I prefer to travel alone. Escorts can prove to be so . . . confining.”
“Oh, you’re traveling.”
“Yes, I’m new around here. I thought it might be wise, Sheriff Goodthunder, to introduce myself to the reigning lawman of the town and to speak to you about my endeavors here in Wendigo.” Raven let her eyes scuttle across his broad shoulders, and then, as though impressed—he was not, after all, an unimpressive man—she dropped her chin demurely, allowing a faint flush to rise in her cheeks.
Dropping her gaze momentarily was by strategy. It gave the local lawman a moment to drop his own gaze to the well-filled corset of her silk and taffeta gown, whose burnt-orange color perfectly matched her hat and her dangling gold earrings inset with orange rhinestones. She knew that men took whatever opportunity they could get to ogle a young woman’s jugs, and she saw in the upper periphery of her vision that the sheriff of Wendigo was just now allowing himself a heaping eyeful.
When Raven looked up, he jerked his gaze from the dark mystery of her cleavage to her eyes with a faint start, and he flushed slightly with embarrassment. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Miss York.” He stepped back and threw an arm out toward the room behind him. “Won’t you come in?”
“Oh, but you were just getting ready to go out, Sheriff,” Raven said. “I don’t want to intrude. You probably have law work to do and don’t have time to sit and chin with a . . .”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” Goodthunder said, scowling. “I was just going out to get some lunch—it’s been a busy day, as it usually is around here—but I must admit that I’m suddenly not nearly as hungry as I thought I was. I’d much rather sit and chin, as you say”—he chuckled like a schoolboy with a hard-on—“with your lovely self, Miss York. Please, do come in.”
“All right,” Raven said, lifting her skirts at she passed over the threshold. “Don’t mind if I do.”
13
Knowing, as did most women, that to fool a man, you need only to start by buffing his ego, Raven sat down in the visitor’s chair beside Goodthunder’s rolltop desk, smiled with unabashed admiration at the man sitting back in his own leather swivel chair before her, and said, “Goodthunder—what a masculine name. So rugged-sounding. Is that . . .?”
“Pawnee,” the lawman said, hiking one boot onto a knee and lacing his fingers across his relatively flat belly. “My father was half. My mother, however, Scotch-Irish. That’s where I get my fair features and gray eyes.”
“Oh, and I bet a very masculine temper, too.” Raven laughed.
“Only when I need to unleash it, Miss York, I assure you. But I can also assure
you that when you’re the town sheriff of a growing mining camp, you get ample opportunity to unleash it!” He chuckled at that and couldn’t help, although she was meeting his gaze directly, letting his own eyes flick back down to her corset.
Raven knew that although she’d been in the man’s presence for less than ten minutes, he’d already undressed her several times with his eyes. Probably had her lounging buck-naked, clad in only her earrings and an erotic smile, on a red velvet settee in his private living quarters. In his simple male imagination, he was probably raking that brushy little mustache that he must have thought passed for cultured elegance across her distended nipples while she pumped his swollen manhood.
He brushed a hand across his nose, raked his impish gaze quickly up and down her gown-clad frame once more, and said, “So, please tell me, Miss York—”
“Please call me Raven, Sheriff Goodthunder.”
“Only if you call me Jack.”
“Jack it is.”
“Raven—now, there’s a name fitting for such a raven-haired beauty as yourself, Miss, uh, I mean Raven.” His deep voice was practically a purr, but she still thought his eyeballs were about to pop out of his head. She’d have bet pearls to jackstraws his pants were getting tight.
“You’re too charming, Jack.”
Goodthunder threw his head back and laughed a little too loudly, with a little too much nervous abandon. “So tell me, Raven, whom or what do I have to thank for bringing you to my humble little town?”
“Oh, just call it the good old American entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Ah, you’re a business lady.”
“Right, I am. And I’ve a mind to move my business here to Wendigo. I’ve been doing quite a bit of investigating on the subject of your fair little city, Jack, and it seems that most in these parts think that, thanks to the wealth of the minerals being mined from the Ute Field in the near mountains, Wendigo might be vying with Leadville soon in terms of size, wealth, and, um, business opportunities.”
Raven smiled and bit gently down on her lower lip as she slowly recrossed her legs, knowing that her skirt was shifting tightly and thus allowing him an opportunity to see how long and fine her legs were and to imagine them wrapped around his dirty old back. She removed her upper teeth, which she knew to be as white as freshly fallen Rocky Mountain snow, from her ruby-red lower lip, and, smiling radiantly, she filled her lungs and felt her corset swell.
Goodthunder shifted a little uncomfortably, making his chair chirp. “I have no doubt we’ll be competing with Leadville very soon. In fact, I’ve heard Miss O’Brien, who owns the Sawatch House, mutter under her breath of late about possibly investing in an opera house. That would be Judith along with her companion and business partner, Mr. Geist.”
“Now, you see there, Jack,” Raven said, giving a husky laugh. “You know, when folks start thinking about building dance halls, their pockets are getting so dad-blame full they simply don’t know what to do with all that dinero!”
“Right, indeed, Raven.” Goodthunder chuckled, removing a long, slim black cheroot from his shirt pocket. “Right, indeed. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all. I’ve always loved the smell of a good cigar.”
“Raven, you’re a girl after my own heart.” Goodthunder shoved some wanted posters aside and scratched a match to life on his scarred desktop. As he touched fire to the cheroot, he said, watching the flickering flame, “So tell me if I’m being too inquisitive, Raven, but what is your line of business, anyway?”
She leaned forward to expose more of her corset, lacing her hands around a knee. She felt her bosoms slope down and separate a bit, offering the sheriff a little deeper view of her cleavage. “I’m in the entertainment business, Jack.”
Goodthunder coughed and waved the match out. His eyes suddenly rheumy, he blew smoke out through his nostrils and said, “Dancer?”
“Well, I guess you could call it dancing.” Raven gave a devilish snort while keeping her gaze bold and direct on the man’s faintly sheepish eyes. “The most beautiful dance known to men and women,” she added.
Goodthunder stared at her skeptically for a time. A single sweat bead ran down the side of his face, following the line of his left sideburn. As his eyes turned fleetingly opaque, his imagination no doubt continuing his goatish promptings, she sensed the man’s pants getting tighter.
“I see, I see,” the sheriff said, stifling another cough. “Well, I’m sure . . . I’m sure one as beautiful as you would have no great trouble at all setting up a, uh, business of that sort in our fair city. Would this be a business involving other, uh, employees, Raven?” He paused. His face was brick-red between his salt-and-pepper sideburns, his nose a deeper red above the salt-and-pepper mustache. “Or just you?”
“Just me for starters,” Raven said. “But after I’ve established my business and have grown a clientele, I’d like to hire more girls to relieve some of the strain. A girl can only spend so many hours on her back, you know, Jack!” She laughed again huskily.
He laughed, too, and shifted his position again with a telltale little wince. Raven was enjoying the man’s struggle to keep from popping his fly buttons. She allowed herself a glance—after all, he’d allowed himself plenty—and sure enough, his charcoal-gray, white-pinstriped trousers were drawn taut across his crotch, with a telltale bulge over the inside of his right thigh.
She had him on his back, so to speak. Simple fool.
Now she could pretty much do anything she wanted to him, and he’d just give her that dimwitted smile.
“One thing does have me worried about Wendigo, Jack.”
“Oh, what’s that, Raven?” he said, arching a brow and tapping cigar ashes into an overfilled ashtray on his desk.
“I heard while researching this area that there’s been some trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes. What was it, now? I think what I heard was that there was some trouble between the freighting companies here in Wendigo. That what was under normal circumstances considered fair business competition had grown rather . . . violent. Do you know about this? I heard that a couple of men were killed, and one was . . . I believe, if I remember correctly, one had gone missing.”
“Now, Raven,” Goodthunder said, dipping his chin to smile at her with gentle chastisement from beneath his dark brown eyebrows, the cheroot smoldering in his right hand, “I’m sure you know as well as I do that not even Leadville and certainly not Nevada City got to where they are today without a little trouble.
“All mining towns—especially ones that have grown to the size of Wendigo and especially ones with as much wealth fairly boiling up out of the ground like the gold and silver deposits stretched across those ridges up there—have their share of problems. Yes, even bloodshed at times. Now, you’re right, there have been some isolated occurrences among the freight companies. There are three such companies in town, including Black Diamond owned by Judith O’Brien and Benjamin Geist. Of course, each outfit wants all the ore-hauling contracts for itself. But you can rest assured that I and my two deputies, Jake Bodeen and Lowry Slake, have it completely under control. Not to say that more isolated, uh, circumstances won’t occur again but damn few. And none of it should bother your pretty head one doggone bit!”
“Wonderful!” Raven stood and held out her hand to the man. “Thank you, Jack. I feel much better. I’m sure I’m going to have a rollicking and financially rewarding good time in your fair town. I have a sense about such things, and my sense about Wendigo is a very good one, indeed.”
She didn’t feel it prudent at the current time to push Goodthunder about the one freighter who’d gone missing. She’d save that for later, when he was even more mesmerized and vulnerable to her feminine wiles.
The sheriff stood and shook Raven’s hand. “Wonderful. My mission, then, is accomplished.”
“Thank you for visiting
with me.”
“Well, how about if you return the favor? Would you be so generous as to have supper with me this evening?”
Raven gave him a skeptical sidelong glance. “Isn’t there a Mrs. Goodthunder?”
The sheriff grinned. “Never has been, never will be.”
“In that case, I would be charmed.”
“The Sawatch House has a very nice dining room. It rivals any similar establishments in Leadville, and the food is better than you’ll even find in Denver.”
“Wonderful.”
“Meet me in the lobby around seven?”
“I’ll be there.” Raven turned and headed for the door, Goodthunder on her heels. “Good day, Sher—” She stopped and swung around with a winning smile, giving him one more look at her thrusting bosoms. “I mean Jack.”
“The pleasure was all mine, Raven.”
Goodthunder opened the door for her. She started to step through it but then stopped again and turned back to him. “Oh, one more thing.”
“Of course.”
“A favor.”
“Anything, Raven.”
“In the Sawatch House earlier, there was a disturbance.”
“Ah, yes. I do apologize. Trust me, my dear, the problem has been well taken—”
“Oh, your men handled it quite effectively, of course. The problem is the instigator of the trouble, that shaggy-headed brute of a man . . .” She manufactured a troubled expression, as though the topic was almost too distasteful for her to mention.
Goodthunder frowned. “You know the man, Haskell?”
“Well, of course, not personally! But you see, one of the wheels of the stagecoach I was on yesterday slipped over a slight ledge, and the driver and shotgun rider were having trouble getting it back onto the trail. Well, the big man—Haskell, did you say?—rode up and helped them, and you see, if he hadn’t come along and offered his services, we all would have been stranded or set afoot.”
Goodthunder opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Raven stepped toward him and placed one hand against his chest, gazing up at him beseechingly. She pressed the edge of her corset against his chest and thought she could sense his body temperature spike.
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