Trouble in Disguise: 5 (Eclipse Heat)

by Gem Sivad

  “You’ve got some admirers you beat when you were a kid. A couple of them are going to challenge you to fight ’em now that you’re full grown.”

  “I’ve got no quarrel with them.” Rats. She’d lived with a Kiowa tribe for more than a year when she was traveling. They’d been moving through Tennessee and Louisiana and she’d tagged along. Then, as now, she’d spent her time with the young bucks, not the squaws. She didn’t want to fight any of them and said so.

  “They don’t want to fight you because they’re mad. They figure if they can beat you in a match, you might consider them when you choose a shikaa.” Miri gaped at Charlie when he said the Kiowa word for husband.

  “She’s already chosen,” Deacon spoke up.

  Miri opened her mouth to disagree, or at least add some words to the discussion since it was about her. But Deacon no sooner declared her taken than the three men surrounded her, herding her toward the MC3.

  She might have been able to out-talk or out-maneuver one of them, but all of the McCallisters working together toward one goal was more than she could handle. She’d thought maybe she’d get a chance to say a few words privately to Deacon before she headed to Eclipse. It appeared he’d already made other plans—and her going to Eclipse wasn’t part of them.

  Then she dallied with the idea that they might get a chance to couple again before she left for town. That had her thighs clenching around the saddle and anticipation making her female juices flow. She didn’t want to be unseemly but if she could have hurried the others along toward the ranch, she would have.

  Deacon wasn’t letting her out of his sight. Instead of the balm of reason he reached for, he pictured Miri facing the ring of Hawks Nest ranch hands with a knife in her hand. Then he reminded himself there were Kiowa ranch hands who intended to court her. He wanted to beat his chest and roar challenges at the Indian men who coveted his woman.

  She’s not yours yet. The practical yet sane part of his brain studied her ass as it shifted in the saddle in front of him. She wants you. The idea made his cock swell ever bigger and grind painfully against the unforgiving leather of the saddle seat.

  Everything, including the counterfeiter business, was suspended until he solidified his claim. He was so filled with lust there wasn’t any room in his chest for air. He pictured mounting her and had to stifle a groan.

  The knowledge of other men who’d discovered Miri unleashed a primitive desire to drag her into a cave and barricade it so that no one could interfere with his mating. The stark reality was—he didn’t have a cave. He had a bedroom on the second floor of the ranch house and five adults in rooms close enough to hear anything that went on within his walls.

  He knew this because he had to listen to his brother and cousin coupling with their wives at night and pretend he was deaf at breakfast the next morning. Feverishly he tried to think of places he could take Miri. The old cabin he’d inherited from Annie sat on the other side of town and probably had spiders and jackrabbits living in it. He was humiliated by his lack. He didn’t deserve to have a woman to care for.

  From the front gate to the ranch yard was the shortest long ride he’d ever been on. He measured every step of the trip and yet had no memory of it at all. When they pulled up in front of the barn, Deacon still had no place to be alone with her.

  It was decidedly awkward. Sam didn’t bother to hide his grin as he dismounted and led his horse into the barn. Charlie was more helpful.

  “Watch out for snakes.” His cousin threw him a blanket before riding into the barn, leaving Deacon and Miri still mounted and facing each other. While he was struggling to find the right words to get from looking to fucking, she took matters into her hands.

  “You got a place to unfurl that ground cloth, Deacon? I’ve a mind to get naked with you again.”

  If, want and maybe changed to where in a moment. Passion flared between them and it was all Deacon could do to keep from falling with her to the ground in a frenzy of passion. Looking at the blanket Charlie had thrown him, Deacon suddenly knew exactly where they could go.

  His mouth was too dry to speak. He lifted her from her saddle and had her stationed in front of him on his lap before she finished gasping in surprise.

  “Mind my animals for me,” Miri called to Charlie as he reemerged from the barn. She was laughing like a fool and clinging to Deacon as he rode from the ranch yard carrying her in his arms. Evidently as needy as he was, Miri’s long slender fingers nimbly unbuttoned his shirt.

  Don’t let me come across like a slavering animal. I’ve got to be easy with her. She’s young, tender, innocent…

  When she slid her hands up his chest, pressing her thumbs against his nipples, he groaned. When she touched her tongue against the right nub, he had to clamp his jaws shut to keep from howling like a beast.

  She laughed, the low husky sound brushing across his senses like a mist of kerosene on flames. He jerked under the caress. He couldn’t get through her top layers so he went straight for the gold. Shoving his hand into her buckskins, he breached her nether lips, his fingers greeted by her wet heat.

  “Fuck easy,” he growled.

  She didn’t pretend shy. She opened her legs for him and nipped her way up his torso until she was nibbling on his neck and clenching her pussy around the finger he slid inside. As they splashed across the stream, she thrust upward and he gave her two fingers to squeeze.

  He was little better than a crazed beast when he pulled up and dismounted, taking them both to the ground, him on top. She didn’t protest, and the way she wrapped her legs around his waist and rocked her pussy against his cock indicated that she was ready for the ride he had planned.

  He got the blanket laid and her buckskins past her rump but he didn’t get her moccasins or his pants and boots off the first time. She was needy too. She made mewling noises of want and he opened the front of his pants, shoved her buckskins past her thighs and rolled her to her knees, thrusting into her from behind.

  Deacon went from desperation to sublime pleasure in one motion as he sank into her wet heat. He followed her hip-swiveling dance, pumping into her as the walls of her channel massaged his cock. He grabbed her hat and pulled it off. She dragged the brown wig off as well.

  She had a kerchief tied around her head. He shortened his thrusts, leaning over her back to nuzzle her neck and remove the handkerchief too. Once free, her hair cascaded damply around her shoulders. He wound his hand into the thick mane and pulled her head back and up, forcing her torso into an arch as he held her hips with his other hand and took her with jarring thrusts.

  When he felt the coiling power of his orgasm building in his spine and tingling in his toes, he pulled out in time to spill his seed on her rump, relishing the way the white cream looked against the rosy flush of her round bottom.

  “Uh, that was—”

  “Openers,” Deacon growled. He didn’t know what she thought it had been. It wasn’t over. He grabbed his shirttail and wiped his emissions from her rear before baring her.

  Flipping her onto her back, he lifted her legs over his shoulders and buried his face between her thighs. She clenched and shuddered under each stroke of his tongue.

  “Deacon,” she gasped. “That’s not right—”

  “Right as God,” he lifted his head and disagreed. Then he returned to heaven, centering his lips and sucking on the button of nerves at her apex.

  Deacon didn’t know the flavor of ambrosia but the taste couldn’t be any more heavenly than the honey he licked from her folds. He savored her flesh, tonguing the inner shell of her cleft before sinking two fingers into her channel.

  “Well, maybe it is,” she moaned, arching her pelvis into the primitive caress as her orgasm pulsed. He replaced his fingers with his tongue, lapping up the new flood of emissions and pushing her into another release.

  When she was pliant, satiated and lolling in his grip, he set her hips to the blanket and fit himself between her thighs.

  “Deacon?” she panted, h
er look almost timid as he thrust into her.

  “Don’t make me stop,” he groaned, slowing down and trying to grab control. He’d been in lust for Beauregard for a long time without admitting it. He needed this, needed her.

  “I’m not telling you to quit,” she answered, her tone cross. “But if’n you could see your way clear to smoothing the rocks out from under me, I’d be a lot happier.”

  Deacon rolled over, carrying her with him and letting her take top position. Her hair caught the last rays of the day’s sun and glistened like spun silk hanging over her shoulders.

  “Dear God, you’re beautiful,” he growled.

  “Hush telling such tall stories. It’s enough you want to couple with me.” She pressed her fingers against his lips.

  He nipped her fingers, then pulled her close to suckle her breast. She shivered under his wet caress and he attended the other nipple, recognizing the flush of red spreading on her chest as the precursor to another orgasm.

  “Ride me, sweetheart. Let me see your pleasure when you come.”

  Her eyes sparkled and her hips swayed. She rotated her mound, grinding the lips of her sex against his groin and taking him deeper with each of her thrusts.

  Her cunny clenched around his cock, stroking his flesh until Deacon also teetered on the precipice of release. Her husky laugh told him she knew his orgasm neared.

  “Come with me,” he ordered her.

  “Bossy, aren’t you, McCallister?” she asked, laughing down at him, and then went over the moon with him, screaming her pleasure at the end.

  It was late afternoon when they’d crossed the stream. They didn’t collapse on the blanket in each other’s arms until the moon was high overhead. She was naked. So was he. Any snakes on the tiny slip of land forming an island must have fled under the assault of their passion.

  Nothing but the sound of cicadas singing in the trees interrupted the night. She shivered and, remembering how she’d been chilled at the Pleasure Dome, he grabbed his shirt and pulled it across them, blanketing her with another layer of him.

  He laughed self-consciously, aware of his cock rousing, already preparing for another foray although they’d fucked steadily since afternoon. “You ready to talk?” he asked.

  “No.” She buried her nose in his armpit, hiding her face from him. “Now if you was to ask me am I hungry, the answer would be different.”

  “Supper’s long over,” he told her, grinning as he got his sense back. He sat up, pulling her to a sitting position beside him. “I think my horse took off for parts unknown. We’ll have to walk back to the house.”

  “Will your folks all be abed?” she asked, reaching for her clothes.

  “Yep,” he assured her. “Curled up and asleep, just as we’ll be after I find us something to eat in the kitchen.”

  “I’m a sight. I need to get clean and I can’t be going into your house halfway through the night. Maybe you can bring me out a plate of something before I head home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Well, as to that.” She squirmed, looking guilty. “I been using a little place that sits next to the river out east of Eclipse.”

  Heat prickles danced up Deacon’s spine and stirred the hair on his neck. “It have a copse of cottonwood trees next to the water?”

  “Yep. That’s where I got my patch-up material. You know who owns the place?” She frowned at him. “I asked Hiram about it and he said it was abandoned and me staying there would be all right.”

  “It sounds like you found Annie’s house. Is it fit to live in?” Deacon asked, disbelief warring with a feeling of inevitability.

  “It is since Possum, Ketchum and me put a roof on it.”

  Deacon snorted. “I have my doubts that as talented as your pets are, either of them can climb a ladder or nail a board.”

  “The two galoots I partner with aren’t pets,” she corrected him. “We’re a team. I cut the logs but I didn’t have a ladder. I had to stand on Possum’s back just to get to the roof to rig a pulley system. When I was ready, I yelled ‘hoist’, and Ketchum and Possum pulled on their end of the rope. We did it. We got the logs to the top of the roof and I notched ’em and nailed ’em into the cabin walls. I told Hiram if the owner ever gets around to checking on the place, I’ve left it better than it was.”

  She squinted at him suspiciously. “You the owner?”

  “It belonged to my wife, Annie. We lived there after we married.” Though her living in Annie’s house should have surprised him, it didn’t. But her fixing a caved-in roof made his sense of protectiveness seem silly. Hell, she didn’t need him. She was an Amazon, a woman who didn’t need anyone.

  “Well, you should take better care of her things,” Miri huffed. “Did you not love her?”

  Deacon heard the censure in the question and struggled to share long-hidden thoughts of Annie.

  “I think I buried most of what we were and what we might have been with her body.” An unrealized barrier in his mind opened, flooding his brain with images of him and Annie when they’d lived in the river house.

  “Yes,” he said gruffly. “I loved her. I’m ashamed I neglected her property. I guess I didn’t want to face the fact that she was dead and it was because of me.”

  “What happened?”

  Haltingly he told Miri, letting himself remember for the first time in years.

  “I was fresh from the seminary, first-time minister and newly married. I thought I was cock of the walk, preaching fire and brimstone in the pulpit every Sunday.”

  He stopped, appalled as he looked back at the magnitude of his stupidity.

  “I don’t imagine whatever happened was because of your preaching.” Miri rubbed his shoulder and tried to reassure him.

  “I wish that were true,” he told her. “But had I not decided to pit my strength and influence against the scum in town, Annie’d still be alive.” With the zeal of youth and stubborn need to win, he’d used the power of his pulpit to preach against the outlaws tainting the town.

  “Ed Johnson wasn’t my favorite sheriff back then but I went to him, asking him to stand up to the thugs who were terrorizing the business owners.”

  “Now I know that didn’t work. There’s good sheriffs and bad sheriffs and then there’s Ed.” Miri delivered her opinion using Beauregard’s distinctive twang.

  “One of my parishioner’s daughters was accosted at the general store. Three of Dodge Henley’s riders roughed her up and scared her to death. I would have been better off bracing the men myself. Instead, I preached against them, encouraging the church members to run the riffraff out of town. I should have kept my mouth shut and moved us to another town. I didn’t and she paid for it.”

  Miri pulled his head down, laying it on her shoulder, petting his back and comforting him as he told her about how the thieves and murderers making up the underbelly of Abilene had conspired to rid themselves of the fiery minister. They’d lured Reverend McCallister from home with a false message from a member of the church.

  “After the filthy animals raped Annie, they cut her throat and pinned a Bible to the floor next to her.” His throat clogged with rage and unrelieved grief as he tried to steady his voice.

  “Ed Johnson was a coward then same as now and it didn’t matter that he was Abilene’s sheriff and it was his job. He flat out said if he hunted Annie’s killers he’d end up dead and he wouldn’t do it. So Charlie, Sam and I tracked ’em down. And I executed ’em. It didn’t bring Annie back and it didn’t make me feel any better.” He let out a gust of breath, heart-sick at his memories.

  “But the heathens won’t be hurtin’ and killin’ any more girls, so you did what you had to do. You brought the men to justice, Deacon.” Miri planted a kiss on his forehead before reaching for her clothes. “You’re a good man. I never doubted it. Now let’s get back to the McCallister house so I can get back to my house, which is really your house, which makes me living there just plain strange.”

  Deacon stopped pu
lling on his denims, stepped out of them and picked her up, striding naked with her toward the water.

  “What are you doing?” she protested. “I’m too heavy for you to be—”

  “You said you wanted to get clean. So do I.” He walked to the edge of the creek and into the fast-moving water that came midway to his thighs. It ran straight down from the mountains and was crystal clear and cold as ice. She made a splash when he dropped her. He returned to shore to fumble a bar of soap from his saddle bag before returning.

  She was beautiful, mad as a she-wolf and shivering from the shock of the cold water. Remorselessly, he lathered his hands, gave her the soap and began scrubbing her body.

  “You can do the same for me,” he instructed her.

  He winced when she rubbed the soap over his chest and pulled on the hair she found there.

  “Ouch,” he complained.

  “Don’t you ouch me, preacher man. This water’s freezing.” She washed him, he scrubbed her and before they headed for shore, she sank under the surface, wetting her hair and reemerging to soap and lather it before rinsing again.

  Then, paying him no heed, she stalked from the creek, shivering in the night air as she scurried to the blanket and her clothes.

  “Use that cloth you wrap around your bosom to dry off. You won’t be needing that again.”

  “And did you think no one will notice my big chest bouncing all over the place when I cash in my prisoners?” She paused in rubbing her hair dry to look at him quizzically, the jut of her jaw telling him she was prepared to tell him to go to hell.

  He pulled a clean shirt from his saddlebag and dressed her in it, lifting her wet hair over the collar and buttoning it up to her neck. Then he smiled and ran his hands up her bare torso under the shirt, cupping her breasts in his hands.

  “After we cash in Ned and collect on the plates let’s try a different kind of client.” He wasn’t ready for this discussion but sometimes circumstances beat out good timing. He improvised quickly, deciding to approach their partnership as something that was a fact to be taken for granted.