Duchess for a Day

by Nan Ryan

  The woman slowly awakened, stretched and raised up onto an elbow. Shoving her tousled dark hair out of her eyes, she yawned sleepily, then began to smile like the cat that got the cream. She gazed at the ruggedly handsome man stretched out naked on his belly beside her.

  The darkness of his lean, bare body was in striking contrast to the whiteness of the silky sheets. Admiring him, she let her lazy gaze travel downward from his wide, sculpted shoulders and over the long, deeply clefted back to his trim waist. Her eyes brightened when they reached his firm buttocks, the smooth flesh of the rounded cheeks as deeply tanned as his leanly muscled arms. The sight of those strong arms and powerful thighs made her heart flutter pleasantly.

  Recalling last’s night tempestuous loving, she sighed with pleasure, laid back down, and was soon asleep again.

  Another hour passed before the man began to stir. Slowly he pulled his head out from under the pillow, lifted it and looked warily around. He saw the sleeping brunette beauty and made a face. He had forgotten she was here. He wished that she weren’t. Wished now that he hadn’t insisted she come home with him last night. Then again, he wasn’t sure he had. It might have been her idea.

  Hank Cassidy made a face.

  He tried to remember exactly what had happened at last night’s rowdy Fourth of July celebration. He vividly recalled the earlier part of the evening. The food and fireworks and the six-shooters discharging in the air. The music and the street dance and pretty little Patricia Ann Vance, the young woman he had escorted to the festivities.

  Hank turned his head, looked again at the naked woman beside him. She wasn’t Patricia Ann. Patricia Ann was petite and had auburn hair and fair skin. This woman was tall and voluptuous and her hair and skin were almost as dark as his own.

  Hank felt his head began to mildly throb. Then it dawned on him. He had, at the good-natured dares of his boisterous buddies and over Patricia Ann’s strong objections, made several visits to the makeshift outdoor bar for shots of rotgut whiskey. It was coming back to him now. He’d had one too many bourbons and Patricia Ann got huffy and warned as they danced, “Henry Columbus Cassidy, so help me if you have one more drink, I am leaving!”

  “Well don’t let us keep you,” said a seductive long-legged beauty with dark hair, deftly stepping between him and the furious Patricia Ann to offer him a drink.

  And herself.

  Hank couldn’t remember seeing Patricia Ann after that. He did remember drinking and dancing and laughing with this brazen beauty. And, he vaguely recalled, much later in the evening, the two of them moving their little party on up the hill to the privacy of his home. Articles of discarded clothing had left a telltale trail from the room’s closed door to the bed.

  He glanced again at the woman. In last night’s haste to get undressed and into bed, she had missed one sheer stocking. It still enclosed her long left leg enticingly. A saucy black lace garter rested just above her knee.

  Hank eased over onto his back and scratched his stubbled jaw in puzzlement. What the hell was her name? As he recalled she was visiting from California; he’d never seen her before last night. They had not been formally introduced, but surely she’d told him her name at some point in the evening. Nonetheless, he couldn’t bring it to mind. Whoever she was, it was time she left.

  He had a train to catch.

  Hank drew a deep breath, reached out, touched the woman’s shoulder and gave her a firm shake. “Darlin’, time for us to wake up.”

  Her dark eyes slowly opened. She saw him and began to smile. “Good morning, Hank, my love.”

  “Mornin’…ah…honey.” He turned away, sat up and threw his long legs over the edge of the mattress. “Get dressed and I’ll have Brady drive you home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said, hastily sitting up and stripping off her lone stocking and black garter. Before Hank could rise to his feet, she scrambled across the mattress and looped the stocking around his waist from behind. Playfully biting his left ear, she murmured, “Have you forgotten what you promised last night, Hank?”

  Hank screwed up his face. What could he have possibly promised this woman whose name he did not know? Had he mentioned Saratoga to her? Surely not. “No, of course I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Then you’ll take me with you to Saratoga Springs?” she shrieked happily, releasing the sheer stocking. It whispered down to Hank’s lap and fell to the floor. She wrapped her arms around him and, lowering her face to press butterfly kisses to his tanned shoulder, said, “I can be ready in no time and—”

  “Hold it, baby,” Hank interrupted, freeing himself from her arms. He stood up, lowered his hands to modestly cup himself, then turned to face her. “Now we both had a little too much to drink last night and we had us some fun together and I like you a whole lot, really I do. But we’ll have to continue this party when I return.”

  “No!” she firmly protested. “I want to go with you,” she whined, desperate to make him want her so much he’d give in and take her to Saratoga.

  He was everything she’d ever wanted—handsome and charming and fun and virile and the thrilling lover of her wildest dreams. And he was, she had heard the minute she arrived in Virginia City, one of the richest men in America.

  “Now listen…ah…I…” Hank shook his head. “All right, I admit it. I can’t recall your name, you’ll have to remind me.”

  “Paula. Paula Gentry,” she said with a hurt look. “How could you possibly forget?”

  “I humbly apologize, Miss Gentry. I’m not very good at names.” He smiled disarmingly at her. “Now, please, get dressed and when I get back to Virginia City in a couple of months, you and I will—”

  “A couple of months? No! I will not get dressed!” she declared. She sat back on her bare heels and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not if you won’t take me with you.”

  “Be reasonable, Miss Gentry. We’ve only just met. And as I apparently mentioned last night, I leave for Saratoga Springs today, but it is strictly a business trip. I wouldn’t have time to entertain you.”

  “I could entertain myself and in the evenings we could—”

  “You are not going anywhere but home,” Hank said. He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away.

  Paula was up off the bed in a flash. She grabbed his arm and anxiously stepped in front of him. “Very well. If you must go, you must, but I’ll see to it that you won’t forget me while you’re away.” She spread hands on the steely muscles of his chest, then smiled devilishly as she rubbed warming circles around the flat brown nipples. At the same time she pressed her pelvis against his and began slowly gyrating her hips. “You want to make your train? Then you’d better take what I’m offering because I’m not letting you leave until you carry me back to the bed and make love to me.”

  Half annoyed, half aroused, Hank lifted a hand, slid long fingers into her lustrous dark hair, clasped a generous handful, tightened his grip and urged her head back. He was both irritated and intrigued as he lowered his head until his lips were an inch from hers.

  He said, “I’m not carrying you back to bed, Miss Gentry. You want me, you’ll take me standing right here or not at all.”

  “Oh, Hank,” she sighed, breathlessly, “yes, yes, kiss me, darling.”

  “No time for kisses,” he said, “ten minutes is all we have.”

  Paula shrieked with excitement when he put his hands around the backs of her thighs and easily lifted her from the floor. He locked long arms around her thighs and raised her higher. Her bare toes dug into his knees. She giggled with delight and braced her hands on his shoulders. With her pelvis now pressed against his hair-covered chest, she already appeared dizzy with desire.

  She anxiously clasped his handsome head in her hands, pushed it back, looked into his sky-blue eyes, and began to wiggle and hunch her back, bending and sliding lower so that her breasts were at his face. She held her breath as she eagerly brushed her heavy left breast against his lips.

  “Kiss it, Ha
nk,” she begged. “Please. Lick it a little and then—”

  She ahhhed with pleasure when his mouth captured the nipple and he raked his teeth over it, then sucked greedily.

  On fire, so aroused she could hardly keep from crying out, Paula Gentry learned that making love while standing in the middle of a room with the summer sunlight spilling in and the sounds of people talking and laughing on the street below was pleasurable beyond belief.

  She wasn’t sure if she was a contortionist or if he was or if they both were; all she knew was that this incredibly sexual man managed to get her legs wrapped around his waist and a hand between their pressing bodies to coax and tease her burning flesh until she was dripping wet while his heated mouth continued to dazzle her by feasting hungrily on her breasts.

  Doubting he could penetrate her without his mouth releasing her aching nipple, she gave a shout of joy when, as if he’d read her mind, he did just that.

  While he expertly lowered her down onto the surging tip of his hard, thrusting flesh, he bowed his back so that his lips continued to cling to her stiffened nipple, giving her what she desired.

  It was rapture.

  His pulsing erection was only just barely inside her, making her yearn for more, making her look eagerly forward to the incredible instant when he would force her down onto it and fill her completely. It was a splendid kind of torturous teasing, a preview of the pleasure to come. For a thrilling moment they stayed just like that until finally, unable to wait one more second, Paula at last urged his head up, put her lips to his ear and whispered, “You won’t ever forget this moment, Hank, nor will I.” And she slithered down onto him, until she was fully impaled upon him.

  Hank moved his bare feet wider apart to brace himself, then stood there in the bright Nevada sunlight, hands filled with the twin cheeks of her bottom, controlling her, while he rhythmically thrust into her. Paula gave as good as she got, opening fully to him, sucking him in, squeezing him tightly, gripping his ribs with her knees.

  Locked in lust as they were, they began to reel around the spacious room. She moaning, he groaning, they did a dance of desire that found them first tangled in the heavy drapery blowing in the open windows while deep masculine laughter rose from the street below. Seconds later they were half leaning against a heavy drum table. Then they found themselves balanced against the high back of an easy chair. Finally, they landed roughly up against the wall, Paula’s bare backside pressed into the lush flocked wallpaper, Hank hammering her hard.

  Ten minutes after he’d first lifted her from the floor, both exploded in wrenching orgasm.

  Five

  At straight-up noon the handsome, thirty-two-year-old Hank Cassidy stepped onto his private rail car—alone—for the journey across the country. The muscular, rough-around-the-edges, hardworking Westerner who had made tens of millions in the mines was better known as Nevada’s young Silver King.

  Hank looked the part of royalty on this sunny summer day. With his smoothly shaven face bronzed by the Nevada sun and wind and glowing with good health, his midnight hair slightly damp from his bath, Hank was impeccably dressed in buff-colored custom-tailored trousers and sky-blue linen shirt. He had the self-assured manner and sleek, self-satisfied appearance of a man who had been born to the purple.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Hank Cassidy came from modest means. He never knew his mother. She died giving birth to him. When he was seventeen his quiet, frugal father, a lifelong miner who rarely talked or smiled, was killed in an explosion deep underground. To Hank’s surprise, his undemonstrative father had managed to save a small sum of money and left it to his only son.

  Hank had invested every cent of his meager inheritance in what everyone told him was a worthless hole in the mountain. He hadn’t listened. He’d bought the long-boarded-up quarry from an old miner who was a pallbearer at his father’s funeral.

  Hank christened his mine the Black Cat and immediately went to work. He spent years laboring deep in the darkness, searching for buried veins, patiently coaxing the precious metal out of stubborn solid rock. The mine hardly yielded enough silver to pay his hands.

  Hank didn’t give up.

  Four long years after his first day in the Black Cat, Hank and his employees hit the mother lode. Overnight, young Hank Cassidy was a millionaire. He bought more mines. He made more millions. He continued to work alongside his men, sweating and straining and toiling and, as he worked, filling the cavern with the sound of his rich laughter. He encouraged the miners to joke around and make play out of work as much as possible.

  His men loved him.

  Hank paid his workers far above the average wage and supported their widows when things went wrong below.

  Soon every miner within hundreds of miles had heard of Hank Cassidy and all wanted to work for the young, likable Silver King.

  Hank’s mining empire grew and finally he came up out of the darkness into the daylight to enjoy his riches. He had a huge three-story mansion built on the bluffs above Virginia City. He purchased, sight unseen and fully staffed, a stately home on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. He ordered a private rail car from the Pullman company. He commissioned the building of a yacht to be harbored in San Francisco with a full crew at the ready for whenever he felt like a cruise.

  A generous man, he also lavished expensive gifts on his trusted employees. Especially on their delighted wives. Hank liked to say that they were the only wives to whom he would be giving presents. He had no plans to ever have one of his own.

  No one doubted he meant it. Everyone who knew the handsome, footloose, cavalier Silver King agreed that marriage was not in Cassidy’s cards, to the disappointment of many a young lady.

  A lover of fast horses, Hank was leaving today for Saratoga Springs where he would spend the summer racing season. Prized Thoroughbreds from his Kentucky farm were being shipped to Saratoga to compete at the historic old track.

  The blooded horses would be transported in special rail cars, escorted by Hank’s loyal friend and winning horse trainer, Fox Connor.

  Once Hank reached Saratoga, he would spend the warm, pleasant days watching his Thoroughbreds go up against some stiff competition. And the cool, mountain nights dining and dancing and taking strolls with the fairest of the Eastern beauties.

  Life was good indeed for the Nevada Silver King.

  Now as Hank settled comfortably in a big easy chair in the plush private rail car, he felt the vibration of the wheels beginning to turn on the tracks, heard the engine’s whistle sound a loud warning blast.

  Hank smiled, took a Cuban cigar from a nearby humidor and sniffed its fragrance, nodding his dark head in approval. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, clamping it firmly between his even white teeth, then lifted his feet up onto an ottoman. He reached for a match, struck it and lighted his expensive cigar. He dropped the smoking match into a crystal ashtray and took a long, slow pull.

  Hank exhaled with pleasure, blowing the smoke out as he turned his head and glanced out the window. The train was slowly moving now, leaving the station where dozens of well-wishers had gathered to bid him goodbye. A half-dozen pretty women had surged forward to hug him and whisper, “You’ll miss me, Hank. You’ll be lonely way off over there in Saratoga.” His answer to each had been noncommittal—a gentle squeeze, a nod of the head, and no promises.

  Hank Cassidy knew he wouldn’t be lonely.

  The summertime population of the Springs swelled with all sorts of diverse and interesting people. Millionaires, gamblers, respectable family folk, politicians and famous actors and actresses could always be found at the upstate resort. Saratoga Springs was a favorite gathering spot for wealthy men and beautiful women. The cream of Eastern society would be in residence for the season.

  Engraved invitations to the many private dinners and parties would be collecting in a silver bowl there in the foyer of his reserved hotel accommodations. The upper crust had warmly accepted him since his first visit to the Springs.
Especially the ladies. And he had learned, on his very first visit to Saratoga, that some of those elegant, expensively gowned ladies were not ladies at all once those gowns came off.

  Claire Orwell experienced a tingling excitement when the locomotive began to slow as the train chugged closer to the depot at Saratoga Springs, New York.

  The weariness of the long ocean voyage and the anxiety of the switch from ship to train in bustling New York City had miraculously disappeared.

  She was no longer exhausted, but instead filled with a great surge of energy. And, she felt optimistic and hopeful in a way she had not felt since she was a young girl with her whole life ahead of her.

  Her sense of excitement escalated when the train screeched to a stop. “Olivia—” she gently shook her companion “—wake up. We’re here! We’re at Saratoga.”

  Olivia sat up, yawned, grabbed her silver-headed cane, then reached for the new hat she’d bought back in London. She clamped it on her head. “How do I look?”

  Claire reached up and straightened the fashionable straw hat, pulling the brim forward a little, then carefully smoothing a wispy lock of gray hair back from Olivia’s face. “Like an elegant, well-bred lady,” Claire said with a conspiratorial smile.

  Olivia’s eyes sparkled.

  Both women were smiling when they stepped down from the train onto the platform outside the passenger depot. A building befitting a resort favored by the fashionable set, the little depot was of red brick with elaborate iron trimmings.

  Claire took a deep breath, grabbed Olivia’s hand and hurried toward the depot door.

  Hank Cassidy stepped down from his private rail car at the train’s rear. He caught a fleeting glance of pale blond hair, gleaming golden in the sunlight. That golden head abruptly turned and Hank saw her face. He smiled foolishly, admiring her. He started to call out, stopped himself, but anxiously stepped down and started toward her.

  But the platform was crowded with arriving passengers and friends and family who had come to welcome the travelers. He quickly lost sight of the golden-haired beauty.