“Just leave him to me. It won’t be fair if we both tear into him.”
A sliver of suspicion went through Marc as he walked nearer to his quarry. There was something about Mr. Holloway’s shuffling gait that wasn’t quite right. And he was holding his head at an odd angle, his chin particularly low.
“Mr. Holloway, stop right there,” Marc said in the low voice. The man flinched, and his stride became quicker. “Holloway, it’s only going to get worse for you if I’ve got to chase you down.”
Though he was only in his forties, when Amanda’s father stopped and turned to face Marc and Frank, he moved like a man decades older. His left eye was blackened and swollen completely shut.
Someone had given Mr. Holloway a lesson in manners. Though Marc had decided to deliver some frontier justice for what he’d done to Amanda, seeing the man now with an eye horribly discolored forced him to reconsider his plans.
“What...what do you want...with me?” Mr. Holloway asked, able to look at Marc and Frank with the eye too swollen to open.
“You’ve got to answer for how you’re treating Amanda.”
He gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. “You’re too late for that. Sheriff Dixon and his deputy already spoke to me about it. I said Amanda’s my daughter and I could do with her as I damned well pleased. That’s when the sheriff got mean.”
“The sheriff hit you?” Marc’s surprise was evident in his tone.
Mr. Holloway nodded, then groaned. Apparently, even the slightest movement caused him pain. “Told me to put up my fists. I threw a punch and the next thing I know I’m knocked on my ass. He hit me with a roundhouse right that nearly took my head off.”
As much as Marc wanted to administer his own brand of justice upon a man thoroughly deserving of it, he wasn’t going to beat someone who couldn’t adequately defend himself.
“Frank, do you think this man needs another beating?” Marc asked.
“I’m guessing he does, but it’ll make more of an impression on him if we let him heal up before he gets his next beating.” Frank gave the trembling man a smile that was thoroughly frightening. “That’ll give him something to look forward to, won’t it?”
“I believe it will, my friend,” Marc replied.
Frank pulled a heavy pocket watch from his vest pocket. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Seems Sheriff Dixon has taken matters, and justice, rather nicely into his own hands.”
Chapter Eighteen
When the bodyguards saw Frank and Marc approaching, they frowned and gave each other anxious glances. Frank knew instantly that something was wrong. The man Frank had assigned to protect Colleen was a fellow named Marvin Richards, but everyone knew him as Knuckles. The sobriquet was richly deserved. He was the kind of man who had a history of letting his knuckles do the talking for him, so to see him appear uneasy and sheepish was entirely disconcerting.
“What’s wrong?” Frank asked when he reached the door leading into the suite of rooms Colleen was supposed to be waiting.
Knuckles raised his enormous hands palms outward, and the expression on his face all but begged for understanding.
“It weren’t my fault, Mr. Bishop,” he said quickly. “She jus’ didn’t leave me no choice.”
“Is Miss O’Malley all right?” Frank had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, yessir! She’s right as rain. It’s just…just that…” His words and courage faded rapidly.
“Just spit it out, Knuckles!” Frank said sharply, in no mood for dalliance when he was worried about the safety of the woman he loved. “Tell me what happened!”
“Well, sir, Max here and me, we escorted the ladies the whole way from Golden Valley. We never even blinked we kept such a close eye on ’em. But when we got here, apparently somebody notice they didn’t have no luggage. The next thing I know, three ladies from a local business showed up with an armful of dresses, sayin’ that any friend of Frank Bishop and Marc Andollini is a friend of theirs.”
Frank’s shoulders momentarily slumped as relief washed over him.
“So then there’s nothing wrong with Miss O’Malley? She’s not been injured in any way?”
“No, sir. I said I’d protect her, and I did. You’ve always been good to me an’ I ain’t never told you a lie.”
Frank suppressed a smile as he imagined what had happened. He’d written a brief, somewhat coded telegraph to the hotel’s manager, stating that he wanted the women put up in the Honeymoon Suite, which he liked to rent whenever he was in Helena. Since the manager wouldn’t recognize Colleen and Amanda, and seeing that they were without luggage, he would have assumed they were ladies with procurable virtues. And since Miss Sofia ran the nicest and most exclusive brothel in Helena, she assumed some dresses might be appreciated. Miss Sofia treated potential customers with great deference, and Frank was quite certain that she’d only been trying to help, even if she had made the worst of all possible choices.
“Well, once that redhead in there saw how pretty the dresses were, she said she was leaving the hotel and never coming back. I don’t know as I’ve ever seen a woman so mad about getting a gift as that one was. Said she wasn’t going to be bought and paid for, no matter how much the money or who was doing the buying.” Knuckles shook his head slowly. “Mad as a wet hen, she was!”
“Then what happened?”
Knuckles glanced at the other bodyguard before responding. “Well, Mr. Bishop, when I was a young’un, me and my brother kind of liked to sneak out of the house and high off to town. Sometimes kinda late at night, after Pa had gone to sleep.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t certain where this story was headed. “So what did your pa do?”
“He had a way of makin’ sure my brother and me were around to do morning chores. Ya see, my pa was a simple man, but he had a way of getting done what he wanted to get done. He turned all the locks whichaway around so that my bedroom door locked from the outside, not the inside. I noticed this fancy hotel can lock from the inside or the hall.”
“So you locked them inside like common thieves in the town jail?”
“Damned if that redhead didn’t go plumb loco when I turned the key.”
“So how long have they been locked in there now?”
“Long time now, sir. I ask ’em every now and then if they want anything, and what I get told most is that they want out. Seems like they’re gettin’ madder and madder by the minute. ‘Specially that redhead.”
Relieved that whatever had happened to Colleen at least didn’t require either a search party or a doctor, he looked at Marc and said, “We might just as well go into the room. At the rate Knuckles is getting through this story, we’ll both be old men before we see her again.”
After Knuckles unlocked the door, Frank stepped through it and into the two-room suite on the top floor of the finest hotel in Helena.
Frank stepped into the two-room suite, with Marc right behind him. He found Colleen boiling mad, with her foot tucked into an ornately engraved silver champagne bucket filled with ice. Amanda was kneeling near her chair, making tsk-tsk sounds of sympathy.
Frank said, “Dare I ask what happened?”
When Colleen lifted her face to him, her green eyes blazing. “You! You of all people!”
Frank looked over at Marc and murmured, “I get the feeling this isn’t going to be the reception with Colleen I’d been dreaming of.”
Colleen said, “I nursed you back to health, and how do you treat me in return? You send some fallen women with armloads of dresses for us!” Her eyes widened, and she pointed with an index finger that wavered back and forth to take in both men. “And what thanks do I get for playing nurse to a couple of roosters like you? I get locked up like a thief!”
Frank slipped his hands inside his jacket, putting them on his hips. He looked around the luxury suite slowly appraisingly, his gaze taking in the empty champagne bottle and the two trays with plates and cups on them. Judging by the dishes, the ladies h
ad ordered steaks with all the trimmings from the hotel’s exquisite kitchen.
“You were locked up, all right,” Frank said slowly, “but as far as jails go, this one isn’t exactly a stone floor and a cold stove, now is it?”
Colleen made an indignant huffing sound and eased her foot out of the ice water. Taking Colleen’s foot by the heel, Amanda dried off water with a thick towel and examined the big toe. Even from where he stood, Frank could see that Colleen’s big toe was bruised.
“Hey, Frank,” Marc said under his breath, “remember that jail we were in over near Deadwood a couple years ago? Now that was a lousy jail to be in.”
Frank gave a visible shudder to show his memory of the event. “We were only there overnight, but I still have nightmares about it.”
Colleen gave the man a censorious look. “I’m possibly maimed for life, and you two are sharing old drinking stories?” While Amanda continued to hold her foot by the heel, Colleen leaned forward to peer at her injured toe. To Amanda, she said loudly enough so that Frank couldn’t fail to hear, “Have you ever in your life met such ungrateful, insufferable men? All they can think about is themselves.”
With Colleen both seated and leaning forward to look at her foot, Frank was given a leisurely view of her plentiful cleavage. His cock was telling him, in ways too precise to be misinterpreted, that he’d been away from Colleen longer than he was comfortable with. The pleasures of her companionship were numerous. Though Colleen was indignant for transgressions both real and imagined, Frank hoped he might be able to change her mood with some gentle persuasion of the seductive kind.
Tamping down his desire for Colleen, at least temporarily, he said, “I take it you tried to kick your way through the door.”
Colleen straightened in the chair and gingerly eased her toes back into the ice water. “No,” she replied sarcastically. “I’d never do anything so foolish as that.”
“Then what happened?”
“The door attacked me. I was minding my own business, and it leaped out at me.” She turned emerald green eyes up to his, and now he saw a glimmer of good humor in their depths. “The next time you and Marc decide to keep me captive, can you at least see that I’m locked away in a room that’s not possessed by angry ghosts.”
“I thought you said the door attacked you.”
“It was the door.” She shrugged, and the movement of her breasts did disastrous things to Frank’s calm. “But the door was possessed by a ghost.”
“And that’s why it attacked?”
Colleen shifted her gaze from Frank over to Marc. “It might not have been so vicious if you hadn’t sent those ladies over with the dresses. One of those ladies,” she drawled the individual syllables out with critical inflection, “seemed real interested in getting to know you better, Marc.”
The last thing Frank wanted was for the conversation to dwell on the precise natures of the friendships with women he and Marc had prior to Colleen’s intimate intrusion into their world. Since Colleen, his thoughts toward other women had changed completely.
“Amanda, I don’t suppose you’d mind taking a little walk, maybe go shopping or something?” Frank was already reaching into his pocket for cash.
Marc said quickly, “Can’t do that, Frank. With all the caterwauling these two have been doing, half the busybodies in town are waiting around to see who comes walking about these doors.” He walked over to the window and looked through the closed curtains to the street below. “Just exactly how loud were you ladies screaming, anyway? There must be five women looking up this way.”
“Loud enough to let the world know I wanted out of this gilded prison,” Colleen replied. There wasn’t even a hint of apology in her tone.
“Marc, figure out something to do with Amanda,” Frank said, stepping closer to Colleen. He got down on one knee near the champagne bucket. “Now let me see what I can do about this injury.” He eased her foot out of the bucket. “Just relax now. Marc and I are here, and we’re going to make you feel much, much better.”
* * * *
When it had been just she and Amanda locked in the hotel room, Colleen had promised herself to keep her anger alive, no matter what Marc and Frank did to apologize for their barbaric and authoritarian behavior. Those men simply got away with too much, and Colleen was determined to take it as a personal responsibility to thwart their self-serving whims.
“I suppose it was a good idea, at first, to soak your toe in ice to keep the swelling down,” Frank said, cupping her heel in his palm. He wrapped his other fingers around her toes, and she felt the warmth of his palm going into her veins. “Your entire foot’s cold as ice.”
Frank took his hat off and set it on the floor next to him, then tilted his head back on his shoulders and looked up into Colleen’s eyes. His gaze was bold, direct, and smoky with a passion that was focused only on her.
“I can warm you up,” he said in a low voice.
He dipped his head and took her toe into his mouth. She felt his tongue, warm and a little raspy, moving over the injured toe. The sensation was luridly sensual. She’d never before felt anything quite like it. The wetness of his mouth and the heat of it in such sharp contrast to the ice water was an intimate caress to Colleen’s senses that responded without reservation.
“Oh...”
The soft sound came from her unbidden when Frank began sucking lightly on her other toes, warming them, teasing her senses. To see such a muscular man, dressed in a fine suit and on his knees before her, sucking on her toes was a visual caress that Colleen could hardly comprehend. She’d never even thought of doing such a thing, nor considered how stimulating it might be.
Frank took her injured toe into his mouth again, swirled his tongue around it, then released it. He looked up into Colleen’s eyes and asked, “Does that make it feel better?”
Her lips moved as though she had said an affirmative, but no sound came out. After several seconds, she nodded. Frank smiled in response and lifted her ankle enough to lick the arch of her foot. Colleen giggled and flinched because it tickled to have a frisking tongue playing with the sole of her foot, but she did not try to pull away. He noticed that she squirmed at having her foot licked but made no effort to pull her foot free.
His lips and tongue were at her ankle next and then the inside of her calf, moving. Sharp teeth nipped at exquisitely sensitive skin. Colleen felt herself creaming, the lips of her cunt becoming inflamed and hungry with desire. Frank eased his shoulder beneath her calf. His palms were rough and warm as they ran along the outsides of her thighs, pushing the skirt of her dress higher.
Frank’s tongue traced a circle along the inside of her left thigh, moistening the skin, setting it ablaze. Her breath was coming in faster and shallower gulps. She felt her clit pulsing, throbbing with her racing heart. Frank’s lips were inching closer to her pussy.
Frank’s lips were brushing lightly over Colleen pussy when he whispered, “I’d ride through the fires of hell to return to you.”
Colleen wanted to respond. There were words, some tenderly loving and others outright bawdy and lustful, that needed to be said. But when Frank’s tongue separated the lips of her pussy, moved upward slowly, then slithered teasingly over her clit, all Colleen could do was sigh, arch her back, and slide her bottom forward until she sat on the very edge of the chair.
A broad palm cupped her chin, forcing her face to tilt upward. It was always a dizzying experience to have Frank giving her cunnilingus, so Colleen was at first disoriented when Marc bent low at the waist and sealed his mouth over hers in a hungry kiss. As Marc’s tongue filled her mouth, Frank’s lips captured her clit and sucked lightly.
Colleen heard the moan, though it took a while before she realized that she’d made the sound herself. She rested her left hand lightly atop Frank’s head, caressing the silken strands with her fingers and thumb as he moved slowly between her thighs, his lips and tongue performing their erotic magic.
How magnificently ironic, she thoug
ht, that such a powerful man should have such silky hair.
With her right arm, she looped it around Marc as he kissed her. Only then did she realize that he had already removed his clothing. The awareness caused Colleen to smile, even while she continued her blissful, tongue-entwining kiss with him.
Time passed. Colleen had no coherent awareness of its passage. She felt the mainspring of desire getting wound more tightly within and looked forward to the moment when the intensity of pleasure was so powerful it was painful. She was in no particular hurry for that delicious moment. She knew that with these men, the journey to a climax was nearly as satisfying as the climactic moment itself.
When Marc straightened, Colleen sighed her regret. Kissing Marc was an experience that simply couldn’t end without her feeling some sense of loss. But when he stood straight, she was given something rather more than pleasant to mitigate her loss. The sight of his dark, sinewy body, naked and rippling with muscle, was hers to enjoy. The fact that his erection was standing out, angling upward, visibly pulsing with wanton need of her added flames to the conflagration of her desire. It was also easily within arm’s reach.
She wrapped her fingers around the shaft and started to pull him toward her mouth, but Marc caught her by the wrist. He pulled her hand away, prompting another soft sound of dismay.
“Him, not me,” was all Marc said as he moved away.
Frank was on his feet an instant later, moving out from between Colleen’s spread legs. When he was standing, she saw that he had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers to release a fully formed erection.
She smiled and asked, “All for me?” A moment later, she answered herself with a confident, “All for me.”
Marc was on his knees on the floor between her thighs even before Frank positioned himself near her shoulder. With a soft, purring sound, Colleen guided Frank to her mouth, kissing him only briefly before taking him inside. Her mouth was filled with his cock when she felt Marc’s bulbous crown nudging her cunt open as he entered her.
Maxwell, Brandi - Colleen's Desire [The Lost Collection] (Siren Publishing Menage Everlasting) Page 17
