Denver Strike (10 page)

From some unseen speakers came the first tentative trumpet calls of a symphony orchestra. At first it was too loud, then too soft, then the music was just loud enough to blend in with the sound of the wind as it filtered down off the mountaintop, through the trees.

Hawker took a sip of his champagne, made a face, and sighed. He would have preferred beer. He would have preferred to be with a woman he knew and liked. He would have preferred not to be in Colorado on a mission. But life, he knew, rarely deals out things that are preferred. The trick, he had learned, was not to expect the preferred deal, but to prefer the deal you happened to get.

All considered, things could have been a lot worse.

Melissa came wagging through the door, her left hand brushing nervously at her hair. The sun was growing gold and low over the mountains, and the pearly light showed goosebumps on her legs and the large erect eyes of her nipples beneath the thin silver fabric of the body stocking.

“Getting cold out,” Hawker said. He patted the water. “Better get in.”

“Are you—did you—are all of your clothes off?” She was peering down into the water, suddenly looking like a child afraid of snakes.

Hawker laughed. “Don't worry so much, Melissa. I'm wearing good American-made underwear. They'd pass for a swimsuit just about anyplace.”

The woman touched her toe to the water experimentally. Hawker said, “You're having second thoughts, aren't you? You think that because you came on so strong, so businesslike, I'm going to feel obligated to ravish you. Well, I'm not. Frankly, I'd be just as happy if we skipped the sex part and just had a nice long talk. There's a lot I'd like to know about your husband—”

“I won't talk about Bill Nek,” she interrupted firmly.

“Then we can talk about you,” Hawker continued. “The point is, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. And I'm sure as hell not going to do anything I don't want to do.” He raised the glass to her. “Here, take your wine. Get in here before you freeze.”

Melissa took a sip of the wine, shivered, then slid into the water. “Hoo! This feels good!” She was grinning.

Hawker reached out and touched his glass to hers. “To the relaxation of a beautiful woman.”

“To my relaxation,” Melissa said, looking at him over the rim of the glass, then stretching her arms back and sliding her foot over to rest on the vigilante's.

ten

Hawker spent a heart-pounding hour going from the hot tub to the icy water of the plunge pool, then to the sauna, then to the steam room, then back to the plunge pool, then once again to the hot tub.

He began to wonder if his body would ever need to sweat again.

They kept sipping at the wine, kept drifting off into the reverie of music that matched the silver-tanged afterglow of sunset in the mountains, kept exchanging easy conversation. Hawker was aware that the woman was yawning more, stretching more, allowing more eye and body contact. He knew that she was coming around and would soon be ready to bed. The trick would be for him to keep from passing out before the time came.

“Steam room time!” Melissa called gaily, pouring the last few drops from the empty champagne bottle. She looked at the bottle with a pouting expression, then looked at Hawker. It was their second bottle, and she obviously wanted more.

“Hit the cold water, then the steam room. I'll get another bottle and meet you in there,” Hawker said.

The vigilante walked barefoot and wet, his feet slapping, into the house. The fire was burning low, and he added more wood. In the kitchen, he found another magnum of wine, and a single lone Coors for himself. Seeing a beer in this house of expensive furnishings and in-crowd gismos was like seeing an old friend. He stopped in the bathroom, urinated, and noticed a bottle of coconut oil on the shelf. He took it outside with him.

Melissa was stretched out on the top deck of the cedarwood-and-rock steam room. Her hands were locked behind her head so that the bone structure of her hips and pelvis was arched toward the ceiling. She opened one eye briefly as Hawker came in. “Umm, where's the wine?”

“Outside in the plunge pool chilling. Why do you keep that thing so cold? One more trip to that place, and my scrotum may just crawl to cover and decide not to come back out.”

“It's good for your skin. It closes the pores, silly.”

“I found something here that's supposed to be good for the skin, too.” The vigilante held up the bottle of oil for inspection. “Care for a backrub, lady?”

“I'm not sure, James,” she said in a small voice. “This has been so much fun, and now if you touch me and I can't make myself like it, it would spoil—”

“Nothing is going to be spoiled,” Hawker” said, “and I don't want you to make yourself do anything. Just lie there. If you don't like it, tell me to stop. That's all there is to it. Okay?”

The woman took a deep breath. “Okay, dear. But I'm warning you, this is a first for me. I know hardly anything about—about loving a man.”

Hawker opened the coconut oil, poured some into his hand, and smeared it on her legs. He began to massage the oil into her skin, enjoying the scent of it, enjoying the sleepy, faraway look on the woman's perfect face.

As he rubbed her legs and the bare skin of her neck and shoulders, he let his fingers stray, brushing her inner thigh, delicately touching her breasts, grazing her pubis with an extended thumb.

“Umm,” she moaned. “Umm, yes.” Her face was flushed, beaded with the hot steam, and she did not resist when Hawker slid his hands into the shoulders of her body stocking, then stripped the soaking garment down over her chest, stomach, and thighs, then tossed it aside.

He poured the coconut oil over her entire front. His hands slid up and down her body, massaging her as she lifted, arched, moaned, and cried. Her breasts became milk-white projectiles, projectiles so pale that blue veins formed a throbbing network of color beneath the fine skin, and her pink nipples swelled as if to explode. Her head was thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open, tongue tracing her full lips. Hawker bent and kissed her. She tensed for a moment, then her small hand wound itself in his hair, and she pulled his mouth hard against hers.

“I've never felt like this, never ever felt like this,” she moaned. Hawker kissed her again and moved his left hand down her body to the inside of her thigh, stroking the hot clitoral swell beneath her silken pubic hair. She made a low growling shudder, a gurgling zoo sound that fit the primal atmosphere of the steam room. She was breathing so heavily that Hawker feared for a moment that she might be having some kind of attack. It must have been 120 degrees in that steam room! He took his hands from her and attempted to lift her to her feet, but she pressed his hand back to her vagina with a feral quickness. “Don't stop,” she groaned. “Not now—not ever.…”

Her hands began to search his body, then began to slide up and down his lean stomach and heavily muscled thighs, then slid his underwear down, and the vigilante stepped out of them.

Melissa was on her back, her head craned backward, looking at Hawker, who stood above her. She took him in her two small hands, touching him gently, studying him carefully as if she had never seen a fully developed man before. Then with a hungry, almost feverish lunge, she took him into her mouth. She was like a starving, wild creature, her tongue hot and alive as she cupped his buttocks in her two hands and plunged him deeply into her mouth, again and again.

Finally, Hawker had to pull away. “I'm dizzy as hell with this heat,” he said. “Let's go outside—”

“No! Here—please, here. I've never felt so wonderful, so alive in my life! James, I'm scared if I leave now this feeling will never come again!”

The vigilante made a fluttering noise of resignation with his lips as the woman found him once again with her hungry hands, spread her legs so wide that it seemed she wanted to swallow his entire body, then steered him into her with a sharp hip thrust and a yip of pain, then pleasure.

“This feeling will come again,” muttered Hawker, “but I'm not sure I will.…”

After all the firelights he had been in, all the wars, the shootouts, the knife fights, fistfights, and mortal grudge matches, it crossed James Hawker's mind how ironic it would be to die of heart failure in a steambath with the lips of a shockingly beautiful twenty-five-year-old virgin gridlocked on his tallywhacker.

“Melissa, I've got to get out of here before I faint! I'll give you another chance. Damn it, let go!”

The vigilante went crashing through the door into the cold, clear wind of the Rocky Mountain night. Below, the lights of Denver glittered and glimmered with all the promise of autumn. Hawker took a quick look at himself in one of the full-length mirrors. “Jesus, I lost so much weight in there I look like Wally Cox,” he panted.

“It still looks perfect to me,” said the woman as she filed exuberantly out behind him. “God, I had no idea anything could feel so good. It feels wonderful! Delicious! You taste delicious!” She took Hawker by the arm, but he pulled away and, with a moment's hesitation, dropped himself into the icy water of the plunge pool.

Shit!

“Isn't it the best, most wonderful, greatest thing you've ever felt! No wonder that old bastard Bill Nek promised to geld any man who touched me. He knew that if I ever found out how much fun it is with a healthy man, he would never ever get me back!”

Hawker got out of the pool and brushed the water from his close-cropped dark red hair. What the icy water hadn't done to discourage his libido, the revelation about gelding had. “Yes, Melissa, it feels wonderful and nice and all of those things you said. But don't you think you ought to prove to yourself that you can enjoy it in places other than a steam room? Christ, I feel like corned beef.”

Standing naked, sweating, her entire body flushed by heat and lovemaking, Melissa Nek was a truly beautiful specimen, as wild-looking and tawny as a lioness. “Yes!” she shouted to the night. “In the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, in front of the fire—”

“You're asking a lot for only three hundred thousand,” Hawker said, climbing from the cold water.

The woman looked at him, then did a double take. “My god, what happened? You're all shriveled!”

“It's not shriveled, it's camouflaged. He's down there someplace hiding.”

“How about if I yell ‘fire,' then grab him when he jumps out?” the woman said, only half-kidding. She stroked Hawker's inner thigh and took him into her hand. “The poor darling. I know just the thing to get him back out. Come with me.”

Being led toward the house by his exhausted member, the vigilante said, “Okay—but only if I can finish my beer first.”

Later that evening, they lay wrapped in each other's arms naked by the fire. The vigilante stirred, opened one eye, and peeked at his watch.

Ten eighteen
P.M.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, you.”

The woman yawned, scratched, smiled. “Hey, yourself,” she purred. “Are you rested up? Do you want to do it again?”

“We don't want to overdo it,” Hawker said quickly, “what with you being a beginner and all. Besides, I have to be going. When you hijacked me this afternoon, we took my friend's car. Right now, he's probably wondering if I'm dead or alive.” Hawker glanced down and added wryly, “Frankly, I'm not sure myself.”

He stood. “Come on, I'm going to have to drop you near your house. I'll bet Nek's having fits.”

The woman stretched luxuriously. “I have a Porsche down in the garage. I bought it just in case something like this ever came up. If the old bastard asks me where I've been, I'll tell him I got restless and went out and bought a car.”

“Clever,” said Hawker. “What husband wouldn't fall for that?”

She wrapped her arms around his waist tenderly. “I'm going to see you again, aren't I, James? I don't think I could bear not to see you again. Besides, we have a business deal, don't we?”

“I'm not an assassin, Melissa. I'm not going to take a contract to murder your husband.”

“But you've already fulfilled the other half of the bargain. You made me feel so wonderful tonight, James. I've never felt so good in my life.”

Hawker kissed the woman tenderly on the forehead. He was beginning to feel an unexpected affection for this troubled, impulsive, and spoiled woman. “There is something you can do for me, Melissa. I don't need money, and even if I did I couldn't take any for this. But there is something you can do.”

She rubbed her cheek against his chest. “Anything, darling. Just name it.”

“Your husband—Bill Nek—is holding two men prisoner someplace in the mountains. They were being held in an abandoned silver mine, but that may have changed. Anyway, I need to find out where they are, Melissa. It's very important. Is there any chance you could find out the location?”

The woman stepped back, thinking. “He keeps all his private papers locked and guarded. In his office, though, there are a lot of maps of Colorado. Those aren't locked. If I could sneak in there and get a look, they might tell me something. He's always scribbling on maps.”

“Just as long as you don't get caught. I'd feel like hell if you got into trouble trying to help me.”

She kissed him quickly. “I'd do anything for you, darling. Anything in the world. But only if you promise that this won't be our last time. Promise me?”

Hawker was putting on his clothes. “I have a rule about making promises to women. It's something I never do—not since I said yes to my ex-wife, anyway.”

“Ah, the bitter divorced man.”

“Not bitter at all. I married a very nice woman. It was a mistake, and we both realized it, and we split. She now lives with a bisexual fashion designer, and they're both very busy with a political action group demanding a cure for AIDS. I wish them both well. I still send her a card on her birthday.”