Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (24 page)

      
Roxanna felt his big callused hands cupping her bare buttocks, lifting her up against him. Her legs wrapped around his waist as he backed against the wall, positioning her over his rigid staff. Her eyes met his in startled inquiry as she intuited what he was going to do.

      
With a feral grimace of intense pleasure he slid deep inside of her, murmuring raggedly, “One way to keep the bedcovers clean.”

      
After that neither of them could speak again for some moments. She held on to him, letting his hands direct her hips for his thrusts, long, slow strokes that sent wild heady frissons of pleasure shooting throughout her body. Their frenzied ride grew swifter and harder as the passion built until all that broke the silence on the warm still air was the rasping of their breath.

      
Cain felt his climax roaring down on him and braced himself against the wall. But his knees nearly buckled when she cried out as her tight sheath contracted around him draining him dry. Her nails raked his back and dug into his shoulders as she trembled so sweetly, so fiercely in his arms. He felt the tangled silk of her hair spilling over his arm as her head dropped limply against his chest. Still she held her thighs clamped tightly around his hips.

      
He slid slowly down to the floor and they sat facing each other when she finally dared to raise her head. Dear God, she still had her stockings and garters on, even her shoes! His trousers were halfway down his legs, caught on the top of his boots! Roxanna bit her lips, feeling her embarrassment rise. She had thrown herself at him like some Hell on Wheels calico cat. And he had responded like a randy track layer. But it had been so glorious that she could not regret it. Did he?

      
He sensed the wary uncertainty darkening those luminous turquoise eyes. When they fluttered shut, he bracketed her face between his hands and pressed his lips against one, then the other. “It was good, Alexa.”

      
“Even if I behaved like a wanton hussy?” she could not help but ask.

      
A crooked smile touched his mouth. “I don't think there's any other kind of hussy—but you aren't one, Alexa. As to being wanton...” He skimmed his fingertips across the swell of her breasts, then raised her chin with his hand and kissed her lips softly. “I like it—as long as it's just for me.”

      
“Only for you, Cain,” she whispered, returning the gentle kiss.

      
They held each other in contentment for several moments. Then he chuckled as he lifted her off him. “I think I have splinters in my butt.”

      
“I could examine it—let me fetch my sewing kit,” she teased back. “Or would a tweezers be better than a needle?”

      
“Flippant little vixen. Just order that bathwater.” He watched with keen appreciation as she scrambled up wearing only silk stockings and high-heeled slippers. The rosy flush of embarrassment staining her pale skin was endearingly innocent in spite of the provocative manner in which she was dressed—or undressed.

      
Li Chen fetched buckets of steaming water, filling the huge copper tub in the dressing room of their car. Roxanna was fascinated when Cain conversed in fluent Chinese with the servant. When Chen departed, she remembered Enoch Sterling's tutelage as they climbed into the water together. After a long soapy interlude and languid lovemaking, she watched him shave as she dried her hair, brushing it until it glowed like moonbeams.

      
Roxanna listened to the soft rasp of the razor against his thick beard, watching as each long clean stroke revealed more of his harshly beautiful face. She had never seen a man shave before, never would have imagined it was an erotic act. But that was before Cain, sitting naked in a bathtub with a small oval mirror facing him on the dressing table as he wielded the strait-edged blade with keen precision.

      
Cain could hear the steady cadence of brushstrokes crackling through her hair. She'd dried herself off and slipped on a filmy nothing of a robe. The pale aquamarine silk clung to every slender curve of her body. He felt himself growing hard again in the cool bathwater. “I can't get enough of you, Alexa,” he said in a low voice.

      
He sounded almost desperate as she watched him climb from the tub. His long powerful arms and legs rippled sinuously with sleek bronzed muscles. Droplets of water caught in the hair on his chest, glistening like diamonds in the flickering lamplight. She put down her brush and picked up a towel to dry him, walking over to where he stood. After she rubbed his chest and arms, she knelt and started to run the towel down the lean hard muscles of his legs until he pulled it away and tossed it onto the scattered piles of discarded clothing littering the floor. He lifted her to stand before him, studying her face with dark, almost haunted eyes. “If I'm taking too much, Alexa…”

      
She shook her head vehemently, moving into his arms. If they didn't hurry, they'd be late for the welcome party. Jubal would be waiting... “Love me again, Cain.”
Love me.

* * * *

      
“It's Powell. I know it is. Old George Willis down on the North Platte knows the renegades. Some white, a few half-breeds with them. Trouble for hire. One of them is a real snake, Johnny Lame Pony. He's worked for Powell in the past.”

      
“But he couldna' tell you for sure that the Central Pacific hired them or where this Lame Pony disappeared to after you lost their trail?” Jubal asked, shoving away the lukewarm cup of coffee and empty breakfast plate.

      
Cain paced over to the window, looking across the rails to where the other private car sat. With Alexa inside it. “No. But we can be prepared for them the next time they strike.”

      
Jubal observed the direction of Cain's gaze but did not mention Alexa. “You mean the army?”

      
“Dillon's command has been beefed up since your old friend Sherman agreed to protect the Union Pacific this summer. I’ll ride to Fort Russell and tell the colonel everything I've learned. Then we'll see what those bluebellies can do.” He started toward the door, but MacKenzie's voice halted him just as he pulled it open.

      
“Yer sure Alexa willna' mind yer being gone so much while yer just newly weds?”

      
“She likes the homecomings well enough,” he replied, storming out the door, slamming it behind him.

      
“Weel, now, laddie, what was that all aboot?” he chortled to himself in a thickened Scot's burr.

* * * *

      
On the long hard ride to Fort Russell, Cain mulled over his relationship with Alexa. She was everything he, or any man, could ever have dreamed of in a wife—head-turningly beautiful, a well-bred lady and at the same time a passionate woman who possessed keen intelligence, even a sense of humor. The problem was that a man like him had never allowed himself to have that sort of dream. He had burned with ambition, yes, but using Alexa as the means to achieve it had been done on sudden impulse. The situation had been dropped in front of him and he had taken advantage of it.

      
Had he also taken advantage of her? No. He vehemently denied that. Her reputation was ruined and no white man would have her, unless Jubal had paid some worthless eastern fop to marry her—a man who would never have let her forget how tainted she was. Cain could never accuse her. He knew that she had never been touched by any of Leather Shirt's warriors or even himself before their wedding night.

      
Yet he could not quit worrying it, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. On their wedding night her fearful shyness had touched a chord of tenderness he never knew he possessed. Then her quick passion yesterday had ignited a fire in him that might never be quenched. She kept him off balance, unsure of how he should feel about her—or simply how much he should
feel
.

      
When they awakened this morning she had been reticent again, perhaps embarrassed by the way she had responded to him the previous day. He always seemed to sense an undercurrent of nervousness in her beneath the exterior of self-possessed St. Louis socialite. Even in his grandfather's village, she seemed afraid of something—not the Cheyenne, not even him, although he had given her plenty of reasons. Something else. But what?

      
Perhaps he was imagining things. He had spent entirely too much time mooning over Alexa Hunt—no, he was forced to amend that, Alexa Cain. His lips twisted in a wry grimace, thinking of her claim on the name that he had chosen as a badge of his solitary life. He pushed that and other disquieting thoughts from his mind and considered what he would say to Dillon when he reached Fort Russell.

* * * *

Summer came to the High Plains fierce and sudden as a train wreck. The heat gripped men and livestock like a vice and the relentless searing wind choked them with alkaline dust. Track layers left a trail of sweat pouring off their bodies as they toiled in tandem under the broiling sun, five men to nearly a thousand pounds of iron. From the wagon bed they carried the rail to track end, then on command of the foreman dropped it in place for the spikers with their powerful sledges to go to work. Sparks flew off their hammers as they smashed the spikes, driving them through the rail, biting deep into the wooden ties below.

      
Cain was ever-present, watching for trouble. It was not uncommon for him to ride a hundred miles in one day, changing mounts at each stop as he oversaw work crews of graders, tie setters and track layers. By midsummer, they had perfected a rhythm. When supplies were available—and Jubal made certain ties, rails, fishplates and bolts never ran short—the crews laid over two miles of track each long summer day.

      
The high elevation of Laramie was left far behind as they entered the killing heat of alkali basin lands and river gorges. To add to the misery of the weather, the dust and the mind-numbing drudgery, there was constant danger lurking in a deadly host of forms—Indian attacks, outbreaks of dysentery and even cholera which killed more men than the hostiles, as well as the explosive eruptions when cuts were blasted, causing two-hundred-pound pieces of granite to whistle through the air.

      
At first Roxanna had watched the progress of the rails and waited fearfully for word from Isobel Darby. Now that they were isolated in the wilderness with the Union Pacific work crews, Roxanna knew that the widow could not blackmail her or expose her until they reached Salt Lake, which was some months away. Given that reprieve, she immersed herself in being a railroader's wife. There were not many respectable women on the line, although scarlet poppies abounded in every saloon and bordello along the way. The laborers could not afford to have wives or children with them, nor were there any provisions for housing them. But a few of the higher-paid professional men, the chief engineers and crew supervisors, were given space for their families in extra work cars.

      
Roxanna was set apart from them not only by virtue of her position as a director's granddaughter, but also by the gossip that followed her from Cheyenne. After all, she had been a captive of the very savages who continually killed and mutilated railroad workers. If that was not enough, she had gone and married the “Scot's Injun,” that fearful half-breed gunman who now lorded it over his betters. It created resentment that Jubal relied more and more on Cain, no longer just as a gunman who could protect the crews, but as a businessman who negotiated contracts and planned strategies.

      
Since she was cut off from the limited social life on the trail, Roxanna decided to carve out a useful place for herself. She had learned valuable nursing skills from Sees Much. Now she worked with the company doctor to treat injuries and nurse the men who fell ill.

      
“If we could just get you damn fools to stop drinking ditch water, maybe you'd stop coming down with dysentery every week,” Dr. Milborne said sourly to the big spiker who sat doubled up in misery on the edge of the examining table.

      
The physician's traveling office was set up in an infirmary car at the head of the Union Pacific work train, close to where accidents were likely to happen.

      
”Aw, Doc, I ain't drunk no ditch water, jest what's in them barrels,” the man averred, then smothered an oath of pain because Mrs. Cain was present.

      
“The Chinese on the Central Pacific never get stomach complaints. My husband said it's because they drink only tea made with boiled water. That would help with the contamination problem,” Roxanna said to Milborne.

      
“Beggin’ yer pardon, ma'am, but me'n the other boys ain't gonna drink no Chink tea. Afore yew knowed it, we'd be shrinkin' and gettin' slanty eyes,” the spiker said.

      
The doctor rolled his eyes in exasperation as he handed her a dose of calomel to give to their patient. “You see how hopeless it is? I can't even get the water boys to scrub the muck out of the barrels before they refill them.”

      
She watched as the spiker downed the noisome liquid, then helped him from the table and onto a cot in the adjoining room, where several of his fellows lay with various complaints—one broken arm, two powder burns from a blasting accident, one infected foot and six other cases of dysentery. This was only Thursday. Business picked up quite a bit after Saturday nights in the saloons.

      
Roxanna returned to the office just as two track layers struggled through the car door dragging a third by his arms. He slumped onto the table and his fellows waited, hats in hand, saying only that he'd stumbled on a tie and fallen into the path of a sledge, which had clipped his eye.