Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (16 page)

“Umm! Umm!” Buck said, and he held her down as she struggled, running his hand across her hips. “I tole you, boys. Got a rear on him like a girl’s! ”

In terror, she struggled against the weight of the man kneeling on the small of her back and glanced over at Maverick. His face was a fury, but he was still doubled over in pain.

She struggled, felt the man run his filthy hands across her rear. “There, now, young fellow. We ain’t gonna hurt you! You just won’t be able to set down when we get through. . . . ”

Gil protested. “Buck, this ain’t right!”

The one-eyed one snickered. “I ain’t ever tried it before, but I musta’ been out here a long time! ! Damned if he don’t look mighty good to me!”

“You and me both!” Buck guffawed as he straddled the back of her legs, her pants halfway down. She felt his throbbing maleness trail wetly against her rear. And she could no longer contain her fright and fury. She screamed at the same time her hat fell off and her red hair cascaded down her shoulders.

There were cries of amazement. “Well, I’ll be damned! It really is a girl!”

Gil laughed. “Roll her over, Buck, let’s make sure!”

Cayenne fought and bit him while Clint held Maverick at bay with his “Big Fifty.”

Maverick swore long and loud. “By damn! You bastards keep your hands off her or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Buck laughed easily, turning Cayenne on her back while she fought and bit. “ ’Pears you’re makin’ a lot of noise when you can’t do nothin’ with Clint’s gun in your belly!”

With that, he reached down, ripping Cayenne’s shirt open to the waist. “My God ! Look at them white tits!”

Cayenne put her hands on her breasts, protecting them from the hungry stares of the men. “Don’t you touch me!” she screamed in frightened fury. “Don’t you touch me!”

“Honey, I intend to do more than touch you! ” Buck ran his tongue over his lips and reached down to grasp his big manhood. “I’d swear I’ve heard your voice somewheres before, too!”

Gil pushed forward eagerly. “You’re gonna share her, ain’t you, Buck?”

He advanced on her, holding his hard manhood in his hand. “ ’Course I’ll share with my buddies. Now that ’breed is a selfish one, ain’t he?” He nodded with a malicious grin toward Maverick, who stood shaking with anger, held off by Clint’s gun. “Here he’s had this cute thing all to hisself and didn’t intend to let us ease ourselves when we all been without for so long!”

Clint cackled. “Shall I kill him, Buck?”

“In a minute,” Buck said, looking down at Cayenne shaking on the ground. “I think he ought to get to watch the fun. Then we’ll just take this sweet thang along with us and share and share alike. Them officers at the fort won’t listen to her story when I tell them she’s just a tramp, belonged to a ’breed. I could probably buy a lotta whiskey with what I could make off her from soldiers.”

He reached down to grab her and she bit his hand. “You bitch!” He struck her savagely, and her head rang with an explosion of pain and the taste of blood. “You’re gonna pay for that, bitch!” he snarled, shaking his injured hand. “I’ll reckon I know how to tame you, make you whimper and beg me not to hurt you no more! ”

Maverick tried to push forward but Clint held the gun in his belly. “Get your hands off her!” Maverick shouted. “That’s a lady!”

Gil sneered. “Ladies don’t travel with ’breeds. She’s just a whore and we’ll use her like one!”

A light seemed to come on in Buck’s animallike face. He reached up to touch his throat, which still bore a red mark under the beaded neck piece from Maverick’s rawhide thong. “I’ll be damned!” First he looked angry, then he threw back his head and laughed. “No wonder you two seemed familiar even though I was drunk that afternoon! A lady! Yeah, that’s what you said that day, too!”

He looked from Maverick back to Cayenne, who was crouched on the ground trying to cover herself modestly with her hands. “I’m gonna take her, Injun, every way I can think of while you watch me. Then I’m gonna let my boys do anything they want to her.” He grinned. “And then we’ll try a little Injun torture on you; see how loud you scream when I cut your balls off ’afore I kill you slow!”

“No!” Cayenne protested, shuddering in revulsion at the reek of the man’s filth. “If—if you’ll let him go, I’ll . . . take you all on, pleasure you like you never been pleasured!” She smiled archly and stood up, pivoting slowly, putting her shoulders back so her proud, small breasts jutted out.

“Cayenne, don’t!” Maverick snarled.

But she didn’t listen. If she could charm these men with her body, charm them into letting Maverick go, that’s all that mattered to her.

She put her hands under her breasts, offering them up to Buck as she battered her lashes at him. “Come on, stud, let’s see if you got anything besides big words! ”

Buck chortled with delight and grabbed her in a hot embrace. “Now you’re talkin’, gal! You please me, maybe we’ll let yore man go!”

She let him pull her up against his blood-incrusted vest and rub her against his male hardness. His filthy hands went around her, pulling her close. She took a deep breath and saw lice moving in his greasy hair. His mouth came down on hers and she recoiled from his foul breath but remembered not to fight him.

The others whooped and hollered. “Whooee! Buck! I believe she’s one of them fancy whores after all! When do I get a turn?”

They set up a clamor like a pack of coyotes around a bitch in heat and she had to force herself not to struggle while he lifted her off the ground, grabbing at her nipple with his teeth.
If it would save Maverick’s life, it was worth whatever they did to her.

All the men were holding their breaths, concentrating on Buck’s mouth on her breast, even Clint who was supposed to be guarding Maverick. She realized that, and in that moment, she nodded ever so slightly to Maverick.

With an oath, Maverick wrestled the rifle from Clint’s hands, swung it by the barrel, and caught him in the belly so that he went down screaming.

“What the hell—?” Buck and the others jerked around.

“You bastard!” Maverick’s face twisted in fury. “You’re gonna pay for roughin’ up my woman!”

“Maverick, thank God!” She pulled out of Buck’s hands and ran to the half-breed, struggling not to weep.

He put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her briefly, never taking his eyes off the hunters. “Cee Cee, gather up the guns, my pistol. Get the horses! I’m gonna see that this bastard never rapes another woman!”

Even as Cayenne watched, Maverick swung the big gun with all his strength and caught Buck between the legs.

The man screamed in agony, doubled up, and fell writhing to the ground. “Damn! Oh, God! He’s crushed them! He’s crushed them! Somebody do something! ”

Maverick gestured with the “Big Fifty.” “Come right on, who wants this slug?” he invited, his voice shaking with fury. “It’ll only make a hole big enough to put your fist in!”

The hunters backed away slowly, showing fright at the anger written on Maverick’s dark face.

Gil gestured helplessly. “We never touched her; it was him.” He pointed to Buck still writhing and moaning on the ground.

“I oughta kill the lot of you but I’d hate to do the warriors out of the chance!” Maverick seethed, backing slowly toward the horses. “You okay, baby?”

“I’m okay, Maverick. Let’s get out of here!”

She tried to pull her torn shirt closed as she mounted Strawberry and watched Maverick swing up on the gray.

Clint’s head turned toward the other rifles piled up by a tent.

“Go ahead,” Maverick challenged. “Let’s see if you can reach them before I put a slug in you!”

He’d made a believer out of all of them. None of them moved except Buck rolling and thrashing on the ground. Cayenne and Maverick backed their mounts out of the camp into the darkness as he kept the big rifle trained on the six.

“Come on baby, let’s move!”

She needed no urging to dig her heels in the red roan’s sides, galloping off to the southwest through the darkness.

They rode at a steady pace for hours in case they were being pursued, although Maverick said he didn’t expect that. “Buck has other things on his mind,” he smiled. “Don’t think he could sit a horse right now.”

Finally they dismounted to cool the lathered horses.

He looked her over anxiously. “You okay, Cee Cee? When I saw him touch you, put his mouth on you, I just went loco! I shoulda killed him.”

She could weep with the terror and the horror of it now that she was safe. “Oh, Maverick! It was so terrible!”

He took her in his arms, holding her tightly while he kissed the top of her head. “I know, baby, I know. Try not to think about it. You’re safe now. You’ll always be safe in my arms.”

She pressed her face into his powerful shoulder, felt his hands stroke her hair ever so gently, as gently as any woman would comfort a child. “I—I think I love you, Maverick.”

He laughed softly and shrugged. “Naw, you don’t. You’re just grateful, that’s all. I’d have done it for any woman.

“Then I’m not special?”

He hesitated, turning her small face up to his by placing his finger under her chin. “I didn’t say that, Reb. I—I—If you only knew how ironic this whole thing is. Why it can never work out . . . ”

“It can work out if we want it to! ” She didn’t know what she would do about Slade now. If she had to sacrifice Maverick to the gunslinger’s deadly aim to help her family, could she do it? No!
She loved this
strange, savage man too much.

He tried to pull away from her. “Baby, I never in a million years expected to run into someone like you! Would you believe I keep picturing you with my child in your arms? Isn’t that loco? Maybe it’s God’s idea of a cruel joke!”

She didn’t understand what he meant, but it didn’t matter. All she heard was that he saw her with his child in her arms. She pulled his face down to hers, kissing him.

“Oh, Cayenne! Cayenne! Baby!” He crushed her to him as if he wanted to pull her inside him, and his mouth seared hers like a smoldering branding iron.

She was breathless from his kiss, clinging to him as he embraced her, kissed her again. “Maverick, I—I’ve got to tell you there’s some men at my father’s ranch—”

But he was kissing her again, bending her backward as one hand went around her shoulders, the other cupped her small bottom. She forgot whatever it was she was trying to tell him as she clung to the powerful, virile heat of him.

“Baby,” he gasped, “I gotta warn you I’m no good for you! You don’t know how bad I am! What I planned to do! ”

“I don’t care, dearest, I love you! ” She kissed him feverishly. “I don’t care how bad you’ve been! We can make a fresh start! Forget the past! I’d go anywhere with you without a backward glance!”

He held her at arm’s length, looking into her face, and she saw the indecision, the torture in his. “You’d do that for me? Turn your back on everything and ride away with me?”

Cayenne hesitated, torn with the momentous decision. Joe McBride really needed her on the Lazy M and she loved the ranch so, she couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else. And never to see her four beloved little sisters again . . .

Maverick’s face fell as she hesitated and he sighed, turning loose of her shoulders. “I reckon I got my answer.

“I didn’t give you one.”

“Yes, you did, Cayenne. You answered with your silence. I guess I don’t mean so much to you after all. Well, that makes my other decision easier. I don’t have to regret or change my original plans now.” His face had a look of infinite sadness. Somehow, he looked much older, like a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Maverick, let me think it over. . . . ”

“No need. I got my answer.” He started walking along in the darkness of the prairie, leading his lathered horse.

She ran to catch up with him and they walked in silence for a long way to cool the horses out. Several times she started to speak but seemed unable to find the right words. Maybe it was better this way. Could she live the life of a drifter’s woman? She to whom roots and security meant so much? And what of her crippled father and little sisters?

It was a dark, moonless night like the soft, silky sheen of an ebony panther. The prairie wind picked up a little, carrying the slight scent of wild flowers. Once she reached out and caught his strong arm, but he shook her hand off and walked on in hostile silence.

“I don’t know why I keep foolin’ myself,” he mused softly as they walked. “I keep forgettin’ I’m a half-breed bastard. No decent woman could really want me.

“That’s not true!” She kept walking doggedly forward, but she closed her eyes, running the tip of her tongue across her lips, remembering his fervent kiss.

“Even Annie,” he said so softly that she had to strain to hear. “At the last, it was his name she called out. . . .”

She looked over at his grim face and there was no need to ask of whom he spoke as they walked in silence, leading the horses. The bitter hate of his expression told her. If she couldn’t forget her family responsibilities, certainly he had no intentions of forgoing his revenge for her. No, not even if she asked him to. Maverick’s soul had been deeply wounded, maybe too wounded to ever outlive the scars of his terrible past. In her heart, because of Maverick’s pain, she hated the man, too, wished him dead and buried so that her love might be free from this memory that seemed to haunt him.

Cayenne sighed audibly. He was right, of course; there could be no future for the two of them. If he did survive the showdown, he would be so furious by her betrayal, by her trickery, he’d walk out of her life and never look back.

Caught between love and loyalty to her family and the man she loved, she remounted the roan and they loped through the night together.

They followed the Canadian river toward Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle because the buffalo hunter had said there were supplies there. The packhorse had been left in the hunter’s camp in their escape, but it didn’t matter because they had no food, only the few supplies in their saddlebags. It had been tricky enough holding those six men at bay without attempting to load a horse with their food. They might have overpowered Maverick.