Love in Troubled Times

by Gayle Riley

  The nearby whinnying of precisely those horses issuing from the barn off to one side certainly helped there.

  Nate made his way around the edge of the corral at a slow amble, not feeling any need to hurry. Warm sunlight hit his skin at a glancing angle, the dappling shade of nearby trees offering a pleasant interplay of heat and coolness on his bare arms and face. There was a lot to like about Remlow Creek, its pleasant weather and natural beauty key among those reasons; on days like this, it was tempting to leave the door open to the store, to allow the cool breeze to waft inside.

  He should have known something was up, just to see the store sealed up like that.

  Nate caught himself frowning as he entered the barn, shoes scuffing across a hay-strewn floor. His family owned a number of horses, and Nate himself paid for his nearest neighbors to take care of them when nobody else was at the Hard Tack. He hadn’t been here for too long, a strange sense of wistful relief settling over him as he slipped inside, familiar sights meeting his gaze. Immediately he went to his particular horse, a chestnut mare he simply had not ridden in too long a time. After a few minutes of meeting her again, he reached for her saddle.

  As it turned out, the Hard Tack remained a house of ill-repute for several hours more, the occasional snatch of sexual noise reaching Nate through windows that he could have sworn, before this moment, were thick enough for that not to be an issue. Purposefully ignoring it, he took his mare around the corral for a while at a slow trot before letting her out onto the small, dirt trail that ran between the Hard Tack itself and the town of Remlow Creek proper. A few circuits around that track brought him back to the Hard Tack just in time to see Barbara leaving it, now in more clothes than she had been the last time they had laid eyes on each another. Seeing him caused her to alter her path, taking a direct line and stopping a good distance from his horse.

  “Hey,” her grin was sheepish, shoulders raised in an apologetic shrug. Her hands were behind her back, but the twitching of her muscles suggested a sort of nervous fidgeting. “Sorry about earlier. You didn’t need to see that.”

  “Nothing I hadn’t seen before,” Nate shrugged, then dismounted. “I mean, not from you. I don’t make a habit of looking at Leo’s ass like that. Yours was as nice as I remembered, though.”

  “Such a gentleman,” Barb giggled, falling into step beside him as he led his horse back to the stable. “I hope I didn’t… make things weird or anything, between you two. He said you were gonna be out for a while, and I believed him. You guys seem kind of… bro-ey. I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be.” Nate led the mare into her stall, then closed the gate behind him. “It was as good an excuse as any to take the horse out, you know? No need to feel weird about it. If you don’t make it weird, it won’t be, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “See, now that’s weird to me,” Barb’s mouth crooked down. “No possessive crap? Are you a city boy, or a country boy? Neither act like this.”

  “I’m both, really. Life’s too short and too busy to fight over a girl when you don’t need to,” Nate’s lips curved upward into a smile. He offered the blond woman a wink. “Besides, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t need to fight too hard to get with you again, little lady.”

  “Oh yeah?” Barb said.

  “I remember what you sounded like when I was with you before.” A suggestive note entered Nate’s voice. “You weren’t exactly complaining. Why, I might venture to say you enjoyed yourself.”

  Barb was quiet for a moment, her eyes taking on an appraising aspect, memories clearly playing out in her imagination. Slowly, a blush crept into her cheeks, and she looked away. Nate folded his arms, allowed himself a smug grin, and leaned against one of the wooden support posts holding up the roof of the barn. He shot Barb the finger guns.

  “Yeah, alright,” she nodded, perhaps a little grudgingly. Suddenly, her eyes lit up. “Hey, you wanna know who’s a better lay, you or Leo?”

  Nate pushed himself up off the pillar, pointedly ignoring her. “You ever fucked outside, Barb?”

  There was a lovely degree of joy to be found in how obviously he had thrown the woman off her game. Blinking, Barb took a step back, wrapping her arms around herself in an almost defensive way. Possible responses whirled in her eyes, from the offended to the intrigued, and each one was a new source of satisfaction for Nate, as he watched her consider and file them away in quick succession.

  “I… have not,” she finally replied, cautiously.

  “Would you like to change that?” Nate shot back, his grin never leaving his face. He took a step forward, and then another, bringing himself into Barb’s personal space, his eyes not so much suggesting as shouting lasciviousness. “And not even in a competitive way, by the way. I’m suggesting this in an ‘it would be fun to spend some more alone time with you’ sort of way. You ain’t lived until you’ve screwed under these stars.”

  “Is that so?” It was only a small thing, but Nate could have sworn he spotted Barb licking her lips.

  “Oh yeah. If you happen to want to find out, swing by here tonight, around sunset.” For just a moment, a small and blisteringly intimate moment, Nate placed his palm flat on Barb’s hip. He pulled back a moment later, but in the scant second he had been touching her, she had leaned into his touch, seemingly on instinct. She continued to blush, as he sauntered away, calling out over his shoulder, “Plenty of ways to see the stars with me, girl.”

  The grin never left his face.

  Chapter 5

  Before he started waiting for her, Nate wondered how long he should wait for Barb to show. What span of time should he sit out there, under the stars, before he allowed himself to suspect he was being stood up? What reason would she have to come anyway, outside of the promise of some loving?

  As it happened, the entire line of reasoning was moot. Barbara was already waiting for him at the barn by the time he arrived.

  Summer nights in Remlow Creek were warm enough that only minimal clothing was needed, a fact that Nate savored upon seeing the woman lingering in the slowly fading twilight. Barb’s summer dress clung to the curves of her body, pressed there by the light, chill breeze that rustled through the boughs of the trees overhead. The advancing state of her pregnancy gave her far more curves to appreciate, the low light turning her into a soft silhouette clad in roundness and light, flowing fabric. Her hair caught the dying sunset just so, a golden waterfall flowing down her back.

  “I’d ask if you come here often, but, I mean…” Nate shrugged. “You will be.”

  “Well, well, listen to your confidence. Mister Hawke. I’ve been told there are nice stars to see here, that’s the only reason I showed up.”

  She offered Nate her hand, and allowed him to lead her around the side of the barn, through the tall grass that grew there, and down the slight slope of a hill lined with brush. At the bottom of this sprawled a river, a ribbon of water stretching off laterally in either direction with its path winding off toward the sinking sun. Soft reeds grew on the bank, and trees leaned out over the water, their canopies just sparse enough to see the sky above through them, while still retaining the pleasant sway of the leaves in the wind. Wild growth obscured the pair from the path into town, the hill leaving them out of view of the Hard Tack; it was truly the perfect place for a clandestine rendezvous.

  “Okay, I’ll admit, this is nice,” Barb said, as Nate helped her down against the papery bark of the nearest tree, gnarled roots offering an oddly ideal seat for the pregnant woman. “I was expecting something else, I guess.”

  “Like what?” Nate cocked his head to one side, sitting down beside her.

  “More antagonism, I suppose,” she shrugged. “We’d already slept together, and then I slept with Leo. I’m used to those things leading to fights. Like I get marked by the first guy to be with me and from then on it’s the black spot, warding off every guy that first guy has ever known from trying anything with me. And when you go out as much as I do, you run into people more than onc
e, and other people that know them. Somehow, I’ve been the object of a few drunken bar fights. I don’t like being a trophy. I just get out to have fun.”

  “Even when you’re…” Not knowing how to complete that sentence, Nate gestured to Barb’s stomach.

  “Well, no drinking now that I’m like this, obviously, but if I find a guy that I like I’m hardly going to say no if he wants to go further,” Barb looked out over the river. “Has to be a pretty special guy, though. Have to feel a spark.”

  “Did you feel a spark with the guy who knocked you up?” The words were out of him before Nate realized what he was asking, and he clapped a hand over his mouth immediately after, his eyes welling up with apologies. Something about this river, the inexorability of its flow, put him too at ease; he had never been able to think sharply when he was out here. All of the major fights in his life had started at this little creek.

  “Yes,” Barbara glanced at Nate sidelong, her voice soft and winsome. As if in answer to a question he hadn’t asked, she continued, “But he’s not in the picture anymore. It’s fine. We had our fun, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Sometimes things just end, and you go your separate ways. I like where my path has led me, and the company it put me in.”

  She turned and pushed herself toward Nate, tilting his chin in her hands to lay an affectionate, deep kiss on his lips.

  “Even when they put their foot in their mouths,” she murmured, the corners of her own mouth turning up into a smile. Sticking close together for a moment, their noses almost touching, Barb stared into the man’s eyes, seeing the awkwardness brew in them, before she pulled away, and placed her back to the trunk of the tree once more. “We don’t have to worry about that, though, now do we? You brought me out here to show me stars, not to yap on about the mysterious origin of my baby bump.”

  “That’s true,” Nate bobbed his head, taking a moment to close his eyes and push down the embarrassment he felt, to remind himself of why he had come here and drag himself back to some form of normality. If Barb wasn’t bothered by his little faux pas, why should he be?

  Desperate to take the initiative back, Nate rose to his knees there in the grass, reeds rustling as he repositioned himself in front of the seated woman, daring to run his hands up below the hem of her dress, his fingertips running small, tickling circles over the sensitive skin he found there. Barb’s thighs tensed beneath her, causing the woman to rise up off of the root she was seated on for a moment, a little squeak of surprise leaving her lips at his forwardness. Slowly, their eyes locked, he slid her skirt up higher, then higher still, a widening smile emerging on his face as Nate, at no point, encountered panties.

  “Naughty girl,” he growled, pushing the skirt up over her exposed pussy.

  “I knew what I was here for,” Barb replied, shrugging.

  “Then I’d better get to it.” Nate slid one hand down the length of Barb’s leg, down the silken curve of her calf, and lifted it up, placing her ankle atop his shoulder. Turning his head to one side, he planted a trail of kisses down her inner thigh, working his way inexorably inward, toward the join of her now spread legs. As he approached the swelling, sweet lips of her pussy, Barb reached forward and ran her hands through Nate’s hair, drawing him in those final few inches.

  His tongue, with little fanfare, slid inside her.

  As the man licked and kissed at the woman’s many sensitivities, the sun dipped over the horizon completely and darkness swallowed the two. Pinpricks of light from above illuminated them, the many stars that could be seen from Remlow Creek’s remote location offering just enough for their bodies to resolve as shapes, as curves and lines, the suggestions of feminine and masculine forms working to mutual pleasure in the night. Everything else fell away. Nate ceased to be the rich businessman escaping his responsibilities for a time, ceased to even be concerned with the tiny rural corner he had set up here for himself. Barb stopped being the one-woman mystery who had followed him, however accidentally, into this tiny little town, was no longer the one-night-stand who persisted beyond the one night.

  She was the taste on his tongue, the heat against his lips. The harsh bark of panting breath from somewhere up above. The tight scrape of fingernails against his scalp.

  To her, he had become the talented flick of a limber tongue, the rich, harsh sensation of teeth running along the hood of her clit. He was suckling lips and masculine grunts of exertion. Fingernails on her thighs, hands grabbing her ass, lifting her cunt closer to him. He was the pleasure roiling and climbing upward through her hips.

  Though alone, Barb still felt a pressure to remain quiet, the fear of being caught like this, by a stranger, at least, enough to keep her lips clasped shut, resorting to mewling whimpers of sensation instead of the full-throated moans she would have preferred. This task was harder than it seemed, made so by Nate’s incessant skill, his stimulation a constant throb between her legs that built and built and never faltered. The man did not give up his assault for even a moment, licking and sucking, sliding his fingers into her, so that Barb came, hard and quickly, her thighs clenching about his head.

  Her own head tilted back and, through the cover of the trees, she could indeed see the stars, quaking in time with her orgasmic shudders.

  When she came down, and Nate rose to his knees, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Barb kept her fingers running idly through his hair, the motions affectionate and tired, after the sheer intensity of her orgasm. Catching her breath, slowly but surely, she guided him back to his feet and hooked those same fingers into his belt, drawing him closer. As she fiddled with the buckle, undoing it in a few quick motions, Barb looked up at Nate.

  “Hey, maybe I’m just horny, but…” She paused here, sliding his underpants down and pulling his cock, already hardening even before she got it in her hands, out into the cool night air. Barb nodded up the hill, toward the Hard Tack. “You got any cowboy clothes up in that old-timey saloon building up there? I’ve got this fantasy—”

  Perhaps there was a set of circumstances in which Nate would have questioned this, maybe asked for some additional details. In those circumstances, there would have been a conversation the two would have had about that. Such circumstances were definitively not the sort where Barb slid his cock into her mouth, sucking gently at his throbbing tip.

  “Ah, someone’s interested,” Barb grinned, her tongue moving a slow, rewarding circle around Nate’s shaft. “Bring Leo along? I see you blinking, you’re gonna hesitate at that? You’ve already seen him and me.”

  She was right, of course; though Nate wasn’t averse to threesomes in a general sense, let alone ones with two men, but Leo? The one man he would have to spend his days with once all this was over and Barb had gone back home?

  But through it all, bearing down on the doubts and quashing what might perhaps be Nate’s better judgment, was Barbara’s talented mouth, working at him even as he mulled it over. He was helpless, in the thrall of the pretty, pregnant woman. He placed one hand on top of her head.

  “Yeah, I think I can fix that up for you.”

  Chapter 6

  In the end, the two of them settled on spending the next day together. For Nate, if Leo could shut down the Hard Tack for a while to get laid, then surely the two of them, cumulatively, could justify doing the same.

  By the time Barb came by, he had dressed himself as she had requested— hardy, long-sleeved clothes, leather boots, the sort of thing that would make him stick out like a sore thumb in New York, but that practically served as camouflage here. Leo had even rustled up a hat, though he wore it in a distinctly self-effacing way, leaning against the counter beside the Hard Tack’s owner as the blond city woman entered and closed the door behind her.

  “Ma’am,” Leo tipped his hat, and Nate resisted the urge to slap it off of his head. He settled for rolling his eyes, even as Barb began to giggle, leaning over the counter.

  “My oh my, partner,” she said, and grinned as both men looked, almost instinctively, d
own her shirt at the generous heft of her breasts. “Ain’t you looking handsome today?”

  “Hi Barb,” Nate said, his words lilting and drawn out. The blond woman winked back, then stood aside and raised her hands, framing the image of the two men behind the counter, clad in their old west regalia, as though they had stepped out of an old Clint Eastwood movie. A smile, perhaps a tad amused, curled the corners of her mouth, but there was a blush to her cheeks that could not be denied. Nate could see, looking in her eyes as she looked at them, some mercurial little fantasy being fulfilled.

  “Okay. That’s perfect. Don’t move, you two.”

  She approached them slowly, as though afraid that moving too fast would unsettle the scene before her and ruin the fantasy before it could come to completion. Wordlessly, holding their gaze with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, Barbara slipped around the counter and between the two men. For a moment she stood there, expression oozing pure sex, before she reached up and plucked the hat from Leo’s head, lowering the thick-brimmed thing slowly onto her own, tilting it to an angle that was, somehow, suggestive. Putting one hand on the counter, Barb lowered herself to her knees and installed herself in the hollow space below it, looking up at Nate and Leo expectantly.