Perhaps this was the best danger of all. He wanted me. For at least this moment, maybe for the first time since we'd met, he definitely wanted me.
One calloused hand slid under the back of my camisole, up my smooth spine. The other tentatively brushed the outer curve of my breast—oh yes! I grasped his hand and cupped it more firmly against my skin by way of encouragement, and moaned happily into his domineering mouth. Dizzy—wonderfully dizzy—from his attentions, I scooped the flat of my palms along the slight hollows beneath his shoulder blades, caught his suspenders, pushed them and the vest off his shoulders.
He stepped forward, into me, so that I felt every inch of his hardness, and I mean hardness. He wanted me, all right. This time when he kissed me his tongue ordered my mouth open, and I obeyed, and he tasted me and drank me in.
Wait a minute...
Ignore that. I drank him, too.
He released my mouth to push away my camisole. I moved my lips to his tanned neck, beneath his whiskers, while the material dropped away to the dirt somewhere and left me nude from the waist up. He tasted salty, smoky, so good, so real. After having no frame of reference for so long, I needed reality, and he was it. His hands claimed my breasts, my waist, my back, greedy, kneading. While I explored his whiskered jaw with little chewing kisses, my own hands followed the taper of his chest to his waist, fumbled at his gunbelt....
Nope—not allowed to play with that! He released me to undo his own belt, thunked it hurriedly onto the table, and unbuttoned his pants while he turned back to me.
Wait a minute....
Wordlessly I reached for his shirt, began to unbutton it, but he pulled me against him, one hand digging into my hair, one hand capturing the curve of my behind, and he took my mouth again. I couldn't quite move my hands between us to make more progress. Not that I had a lot of strength by this point, anyway—my whole being was dissolving into his touch. My knees were starting to collapse. It occurred to me that I was no longer in control of this situation, if I ever had been. We were charging ahead at Jacob Garrison's speed, and I might as well try to stop a stampede as fight the power of his passion.
Not that I wanted him to stop. I thought I'd maybe die, if he stopped.
I'd fallen weakly against him, but it still surprised me a little to be backed against the bed, with him jerking at my drawers. He growled a low rumble of frustration—I'd double-tied the bow—and I laughed throatily and pushed his clumsy hands away to untie them myself, to let them slip down my black-stockinged legs to the floor. If that made him impatient, wait until he found out about button hooks!
But he obviously didn't care about my shoes or stockings, nor the fact that he was almost fully dressed. He was scooping up my legs, cradling me for the briefest moment before laying me onto the bed, on top of his coat, then levering himself onto knees over me. Wait a minute, I thought—but when he caught my mouth again, chewing my lower lip, running a greedy palm up and down the smoothness of my thigh, I forgot the protest against the anxious surge of hunger that had been building in me, building for I don't know how long, building toward breaking. Oh, I wanted it to break. But not yet. Not yet.
He stopped kissing me long enough to watch himself trace a callused finger across the tops of my breasts, tracing my tan line....
My tan line! How had I not placed the significance before? I must have been in the sun a lot, wearing waaay too little, to have this clear a line of demarcation. Obviously he thought it was sexy as hell; that made me feel beautiful, powerful. Realizing that he must have seen it when he found me, that maybe every time he'd looked at me, all week, he'd been picturing my naked breasts and their tan line and what it signified, was even sexier.
I skimmed my hands over his bearded jaw and combed my fingers into his hair, then used his hair to drag his head and thus his mouth back to me with an anxious whimper, and he obliged me with another powerful, possessive kiss. Oh yes. I wanted to murmur throaty encouragement to him, to use language that would anger and excite him. I wanted him, and whatever that meant... no, of course I knew what that meant... didn't I?
He nudged his still-covered knee between both of mine; a jolt shuddered deliciously through me at the breadth and hardness of his thigh, and I squirmed happily, my legs wrapping his as I made room for him. "Yes," I gasped into his open mouth.
When he fumbled at his gaping pants to push them farther down, then at the fly of his own underwear, the back of his hand between my legs stirred even more excitement in me. So did his rasping breath.
I rocked beneath him, anxious. "Please...."
Then, something hot and hard nudged against me, something I'd known about but somehow hadn't fully expected. Wait a minute—
A thrust—"Wait!"—a tearing pain.
I cried out. "Shit!" is what I yelped, tears burning into my eyes. It hurt! Wait a minute! I'd changed my mind, I didn't want....
Garrison, for his part, froze like a buck at the wrong end of a rifle—and not, for once, because of my language. His expression, so close to my face, looked like someone had slugged him. And in that split second, even as the unexpected stab of pain receded to more of an overfull discomfort, I felt much the same way.
It was suddenly apparent to both of us.
I'd never been a whore.
Chapter 15 - Me Again
Oh my God I've never done this before what am I doing—and with him!—I've changed my mind I want to go home—
If we'd both panicked, things would have gotten real messy real fast. But Garrison—he still wasn't Jacob to me—lay very still, swallowed back his momentary shock, then brushed my cheek with his fingers. I realized he was smudging away a tear.
"Shhh," he murmured, low and quiet, like we had a secret, like I'd heard him talk to his horses. "Hush now. I'm sorry. Shhh."
Maybe I should have felt insulted, to be talked to like a horse. But I was too hurt, too hungry for the comfort, too desperate for the distraction from his physical intrusion—big and firm and inside me—to feel anything but gratitude that someone else was taking charge.
No reason to panic, his tone assured me; so did his touch, far softer than it had been moments ago, as he stroked my hair back from my face. So did his steady, confident gaze. Stay calm, his gray eyes assured me. It will be all right.
If his fingers shook, it could be for any number of reasons.
True or not, I clung to the silent promise, almost as tightly as I clung to him, discomfort or not. When I felt his muscles bunch as if to carefully slide out of me, off of me, I held on tighter.
"Don't go!" I gasped, unwilling—or unable—to face anymore without someone. Without him. The pain was almost gone, but him... "Please. Please—"
"Shhh... ." He kissed my forehead, kissed my cheek, so tender. "Hush now." Maybe he knew what he was doing; maybe he didn't. But the soothing rumble of his voice, the firm, slow stroke of his hand down my neck and my shoulder said he did. And that was the encouragement I needed to relax my panic-tightened muscles, catch my breath, and fully remember what the hell we were in the middle of doing.
I'm very afraid that I blushed.
If he noticed, he didn't laugh—not that Jacob Garrison was much of a laugher, but he didn't give me any of his looks, either. He kissed my ear and my jaw, soft little kisses, all the while murmuring those soothing non-words, and he stroked that steady, slow hand farther over my shoulder, down my arm. His thumb glanced across my breast. "Hush."
I gasped, surprised by a tickling resurgence of desire, and I thought—maybe this wasn't so completely uncomfortable after all. I took another deep breath, inhaled him, and relaxed just a little more. I liked his coat, the one I'd worn that long first day, being under me, warm and familiar.
He shifted his weight slightly, so that he moved inside me, and the tickle of desire flared into a slow, expectant throb. Interesting! Hardly uncomfortable at all. I arched up to kiss him, and not a soft, gentle kiss like the ones he'd just been giving me. No, this was a hungrier kiss, like the ones that ha
d come before, anxious and inviting and needy. Love me.
He hesitated, stared intently down at me—and, still pinned, I squirmed awkwardly under him, both embarrassed and kind of turned on by the contrast of my nakedness against his full-length, high-collar shirt. By the scratch of denim against my bare, clean-shaven legs. Damn it, it was too late not to do this! Something had started between us, something wild and overwhelming and... significant. I didn't want it to end in a yelp of pain and timid retreat! For a few blissful minutes, instead of being a burden, I'd been just what he wanted, what he needed....
I anchored an arm behind his neck, arched upward again and nibbled on his earlobe. "Don't go," I begged him breathily, between nibbles. When he exhaled against my collarbone—a hot, shaky breath—and shifted himself again, I was glad I had. I kissed his ear and sank back onto the cot, searching his feverish eyes, and I saw the revived hunger in his shuttered gaze, and I knew he wasn't leaving. Not yet.
He traced a callused hand down my bare torso, as if learning me by touch, and I stretched against him.
Holding my gaze, he shifted his hips and slid deeper into me again, and this time when I caught my breath it was at a swirl of new pleasure. I squirmed encouragement under him, and he pillowed my head on his bent arm as he drew out, then slid into me more firmly—still big, but not a hurt now so much as a wonder. His lips parted in a silent gasp of his own. I let my neck fall back over the pillow of his arm, showing my throat, and lost myself in the full-body sensation of this. His thrusts began to capture a slow rhythm, and the cot ropes creaked, and he took my lips with his, not so gentle this time. I met the kiss, open-mouthed, and now we made love.
Him, the Boss, Jacob Garrison—he drowned out everything else. He's taming me, I thought at one point, on a momentary breath of lucidity. As he might with an unbroken filly, he took his cues from my reactions, moving more surely when I smiled or moaned happily, slowing down when I tensed or whimpered. He rode me, controlled me with his mouth and body and touch while I opened myself to that control and let him carry me along. He both sheltered and shook me, sent licks of joy trembling through me, and I dug my fingers through the cloth of his shirt and into his back and held on for dear life. Him. It didn't matter where we were...as long as it was him.
When he groaned his own harsh pleasure into my neck, stiffening and then shuddering against me, I felt a hot rush from having brought it to him. I held tight to him as he sank fully onto me, blanketed me with his weight. Only then, and slowly, did the spinning world begin to slow, then finally stop. I lay beneath him, in his arms, safe and happy and feeling incredibly physical, while he panted his exhaustion near my ear. No wonder sex was so popular. The ride was over and, bumpy start or not, I wouldn't mind riding again!
But from the way Garrison suddenly pulled out of me and rolled off of me, as soon as he caught his breath, I don't think he felt quite the same way.
Turning away from me, he yanked his pants back up, hitched his suspenders over his shirted shoulders, fumbled at his fly. Was he trembling? While I lay on my side, to better watch from a daze, he snatched his vest from the floor, then didn't quite glance at his coat because I was on it. He stood for a moment, his back ramrod stiff, still not facing me. Then he drawled a shaky, "Git dressed." And he left. Just like that.
He grabbed both the gunbelt and the gold coin on his way out.
What the hell was that?
For a few minutes I didn't even move. I felt loved and abused at the same time, my sticky, drying body confusing the wake of pleasure and lingering pain in a dull, erotic throbbing. I touched myself, between my legs, in wonder of what had just happened. I wanted to lay on Fanny's rickety bed long enough to figure it all out despite—or hell, maybe because of—the Boss's curt order.
Git dressed. Hardly words to brighten a woman's deflowering! But I wasn't a whore, not even now. That was why he'd taken the coin back... wasn't it? I wasn't a virgin anymore—but I wasn't a prostitute, and I didn't belong here.
Besides, I had someone to murder back at the doctor's office.
So, still dazed and thinking it was maybe a blessing that I was, I cautiously sat up—ouch—and then stood. One of my stockings sagged to my knee, and the other fell all the way to my ankle, so my first order of business was rolling them back up my legs and retying the garters. I used a piece of my petticoat to wipe myself clean between my legs—don't think about that—before I reassembled my new, slightly worse-for-wear girl clothes. I put my hair back into its snood, but without a mirror or Mrs. Staunton's help, I doubted it looked any neater than my attempt at a bow behind my back.
I stepped on something.
Belatedly, I thought to kneel on the floor and gather up my scattered egg money from where Garrison had thrown it... and finally something made its way through my daze.
The coins looked awfully funny.
The largest were two silver half dollars and three silver dollars. Several were dimes, quarters, nickels. But three, like Garrison's, really were gold! One had an Indian-princess head on it and read "three dollars." A three-dollar coin? More amazing, two had a Liberty head and an eagle on them, and read "ten dollars." The cowboys had given me change, all right. Right around thirty dollars worth of change!
The dates on the coins—1869, 1874, 1877—seemed equally significant. I knew I'd never held coins this old before.
This... old?
The alternative to me being a high-priced escort hovered at the edge of my awareness, waiting for me to recognize it for whatever it was. Not yet, I begged it. Not yet. It had been at least a week since the awful thing, whatever it was, had separated me from me, after all. A little more denial there wouldn't change much. But it hadn't been ten minutes since I—
That is, since the Boss—
In any case, I had to prioritize my crises. The first order of business was to find out how alone I really was, and if I put it off much longer, I would never get up the nerve. So, putting the coins and torn bandana back into my little purse, I collected Garrison's coat and made myself step outside Fanny's crib.
The shadows were lengthening; since it was summer, that meant it was getting fairly late. For a moment, all I could see was the ugly little path through the cribs, the prairie, the back of several Dodge City saloons—showing their false fronts for what they were—and a couple of tired prostitutes. I was afraid to turn and look beside me, afraid I'd see nothing more. But I did turn.
And he was there.
Garrison stood silent, holding up the wall of the crib I'd been in, smoking a cigarette. Even under the shadow of his hat, I could tell he was eyeing me, and the moment of hurt that I caught in his gaze, before it hardened itself into a more characteristic disapproval, surprised me... so much so that I decided I must have been mistaken. I was the one who'd been hurt, after all, and I wasn't glaring at him. Even now, noting his stiff posture, sensing the shield of distance he wore around himself, I could remember the touch of his hands, of his lips... the illogical, overwhelming joy of him wanting me and fulfilling my wants.
Contrasted against his abrupt departure, and this new disapproval, I wasn't sure what to feel about him now. He'd always been a hard man to read. But it soothed something inside me, to know he'd stayed. My world felt a little more secure, just for that.
I handed him his coat.
Taking it, he dropped the cigarette and ground it out in the dust under his heel. Bad for you, I thought, and looked quickly away from his unwavering scowl. By another crib, the redheaded prostitute—Alice—and the black woman huddled together, watching me but saying nothing. I glanced from them to Garrison, and saw that whereas he was scowling at me, he wouldn't even look at them, wouldn't acknowledge their presence from fifteen feet away.
Hypocrite.
Lifting my chin defiantly, I walked over to them. The glare that I sensed from Garrison burned against my spine. The older women—but how old were they, really?—split their attention between me and the angry trail boss somewhere behind me.
&n
bsp; "You all right, honey?" asked Alice, low and guilty. "I didn't know when he asked about you that he'd be so rough...."
What? For a flustered moment I thought she'd been spying, that she knew I'd just been deflowered, that she was criticizing the very wildness that I'd savored in... in my lover? Not quite. But then I remembered the door-kicking. Ah. That must have looked as scary from the outside as it had from the inside.
"I'm fine," I assured her, though to be honest I couldn't quite tell yet. In any case, she didn't need any more burdens just because I felt like whining. "And I'm sorry about Fanny's door. Will three dollars cover it?" I dug the strangest of the coins out of my little purse.
Alice shook her head. "Ain't our problem, honey. Landlord will take care of it afore he rents it out again. At fifteen dollars a week, he can swaller the repairs hisself."
"Then will you please take this and buy yourself something you need? Or just something nice?"
She stared, her mouth falling open to show her ravaged teeth.
"Please. You were kind, and I would very much like you to—"
But even before I'd finished my plea, she'd snatched the coin from my hand. "Didn't say I wouldn't!" she protested, looking it over as if to spot a counterfeit. The black woman stepped closer to look too; I hoped Alice would share. "Your loss, honey."
"I don't think so." God, but I sounded calm. Something had happened to me here, something other than just Garrison. While I'd been focused on him, and his hunger, and what our bodies could do together, I'd forgotten to think—and my other defenses had been crumbling. Memories no longer tumbled onto me in chunks. While I wasn't looking, they'd buried me up to my neck, surrounded me like a sand trap, closer than ever before.
I didn't know everything, yet. By no means did I know everything. But I sensed that, of all the things I'd lost this week, the coin was minor. I turned away and Alice said, "You really ain't one of us, are you?"
"No," I said. "No, I'm not." And I walked back to Garrison and stopped in front of his full disapproval, just daring him to comment on my friends this time. He'd put his coat back on. If he meant to spit on me and stalk away, now was his chance.
OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) Page 22
