Wild to the Bone (22 page)

Her eyes acquired a troubled cast, and then she said, canting her head to one side and looking pained, “Miss York, I'd like to apologize for my behavior last night. What I said about . . . well, about Duke and you. That was terribly out of line. I don't know what came over me. It was beneath me, and—”

“Please make no mention of it, Mrs. Shirley. I completely understand. You were just tired and not expecting company.”

“Please call me Penny.”

“And I'm Raven.” She extended her hand.

Penny shook it, smiling. “I'm not usually so rude. But you're right, I was tired.”

“And one of your sons was sick.”

“Yes, but that's no excuse. I just hope you'll accept my apology and please join us some other evening for that meal you were expecting
last
night. Would you do that? I'd invite you for tonight, but I'm afraid I'll likely be doing inventory until after dark, and Duke said he needed to haul supplies to two of the relay stations up north.”

“Apology accepted, and I'll come whenever you've the time. Tonight wouldn't exactly be opportune for me, anyway.”

“Yes, I suppose you're trying to find the gang that's been robbing Duke's stage line.”

“Well, I'm about to
start
trying. It's a big country out here. Hard to know where to even begin looking.”

Mrs. Shirley narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing her visitor. “How does one so beautiful become a Pinkerton agent, Miss York?”

“That's a long story, Penny. And it really doesn't have much to do with looks.”

“I'll bet it's an interesting story.” Penny said this in a sadly wistful tone, no doubt trying to envision a more colorful life for herself beyond the mercantile and Spotted Horse.

“You'd be surprise how dull long stretches of it can be,” Raven dryly assured her.

There was a short, awkward silence, and then Penny said, as though the thought had just occurred to her, “Oh, I bet you came to see Duke.”

“I did have a few questions for him. Is he around, Penny?”

“In fact, he's back at the stage station, helping the hostlers outfit a replacement coach with a new set of wheels. Best catch him now, before he rides out to the relay station. Would you like me to show you where the station's at?”

“No, I think I can find it. North end of town, right?”

Penny, smiling, said it was, and Raven bid the woman good day. She started to leave, then stopped and swung around, and for the life of her, she wasn't sure why she said what she said next. “Oh, Penny, I hear congratulations are in order.”

Penny frowned, puzzled. “They are?”

“Yes, Duke informed me last night that you and he had another young Shirley on the way.” Raven pinched her hat brim and smiled. “I wish you the best of luck.”

“Oh. Thank you, Raven!” Penny said.

But her smile seemed a little glued on, Raven thought as she headed out the front door and down the mercantile's loading-dock steps.

Raven had no idea what had compelled her to congratulate a woman she hardly knew, but she had a feeling that deep down in her investigator's cynical soul, she'd been expecting the very response she'd received.

A damned curious one.

25

H
askell picked up
the blanket-wrapped body of Danny Stoveville by the young man's shoulders. His sister Dulcy picked her brother up by his ankles, and together she and the Pinkerton half-carried, half-slid the boy over to the freshly dug grave. Dropping to their knees, Haskell and Dulcy gently lowered the boy into the hole.

During the maneuver, the blanket had slipped, uncovering the boy's face. Dulcy leaned down into the four-foot-deep grave and drew a corner of the blanket back over her brother's face.

“Say a few words over him?” Haskell asked.

Dulcy glanced over her shoulder at him, squinting one eye sheepishly. “I don't know any. We weren't brung up Christian, I'm afraid.”

“I can say the Lord's Prayer.” The West Texas ranch that Haskell had been raised on was too far from a church for the Haskells to have attended regular services, but Bear's mother, Alma Haskell, had taught them a few things from the family Bible.

Dulcy hiked a shoulder and gained her feet. “Couldn't hurt, I reckon.”

She and Haskell stood beside the grave, staring down, hands crossed before them, as he recited the Lord's Prayer above the growing wind.

When he'd finished, Dulcy said, “That it?”

“Yep.”

“Don't make much sense to me.”

“Gotta admit I've never been able to decipher it all the way, myself.”

“We'd best get him covered up before the rain blows in,” Dulcy said, grabbing a shovel.

They hadn't quite gotten Danny's grave covered and mounded with rocks to hold predators at bay, before the first chill raindrops were whipped against them by the wind now howling out of the west. They finished covering the freshly mounded dirt and gravel with large rocks, and then Haskell and Dulcy tossed their shovels into the wagon box, Dulcy laughing and yelling, “We're gonna get soaked to the gills!”

She ran to her horse fidgeting nearby and leaped into the saddle. “Last one to the barn's a rotten egg!”

With that, she poked spurs at the steeldust's flanks, and the mare went lunging down the trail toward the ranch yard, which was now obscured behind a heavy gray-brown veil of blowing dust and rain. Haskell paused to stare after the girl, whom he could hear yelling raucously above the wind's grunts and growls and the thunder's mighty rumbling.

He glanced at the as-yet-unmarked grave of Dulcy's freshly buried brother. The girl was from a resilient lot, he silently opined, and then leaped up onto the wagon, released the brake, swung the black around the graves, and pointed it down the bench.

The black fairly hurled itself through the rain toward the ranch yard, instinctively knowing it would find shelter and likely hay and water down there. Haskell gave the beast its head, clattering across the wash at the bottom of the hill and then into the yard.

The cold rain lashed him. He winced against the wind poking chill fingers at him, but it was a bracing cold, and the wind was fresh with the smell of damp sage and nitrogen.

The barn's double doors had been thrown wide, and Dulcy stood to one side, beckoning, the wind blowing her hair wildly about her head and buffeting her hat hanging down her back by its thong. Haskell drove the horse and wagon straight through the doors and then hauled back on the reins.

Dulcy drew the doors closed behind him. She'd already unsaddled the mare, and now she helped Haskell unhitch the black from the wagon. They stabled both mounts, wiped them down with scraps of burlap, watered and grained them, and then rushed back out into the storm.

By now, the ranch yard was a large mud puddle being pelted with quarter-sized raindrops. The screeching wind drove it nearly sideways. Bear and Dulcy ran with their heads down toward the cabin, mud splashing up against their legs. Dulcy ran up the three steps of the little stoop and stopped under the roof.

“Look at us!” She laughed, holding her hands down to display her muddy denims. “We're a mess! We'd best shuck out of these duds out here. I keep a clean house.”

Haskell looked at her skeptically.

She was already kicking out of her boots and unbuttoning her shirt. “Don't be shy!” She laughed again and let her eyes flick up and down the big man's soaked frame to which his shirt and pants clung like second skins. Her own clothes did the same to her own curvy body. Her soaked shirt was drawn taut against her breasts and jutting nipples.

Haskell watched her shuck out of her shirt and toss it back behind her. She gazed back at him, smiling alluringly as, now wearing only a wash-worn chemise trimmed with a small bow across her cleavage, she unbuttoned her denims and crouched to waggle her fanny and peel the wet pants down her hips and thighs. As she did, her breasts swayed back and forth behind the chemise that clearly outlined them, revealing the pebbled nipples.

Bear glanced around cautiously. He didn't want to literally get caught with his pants down by the coach-robbing gang.

“What're you lookin' for, big man?” Dulcy said, leaning against the porch rail to kick out of her left pant leg. “My
gang
?” She winked, mocking him.

She straightened, grabbed the bottom of her chemise, and peeled it slowly up to reveal her pale, round breasts. Then she lifted it over her head, lifting her hair along with it, and tossed it down with her jeans, her wet hair cascading beautifully down around her shoulders and breasts.

Haskell snorted and shook his head. She had him. Sure, someone with a rifle might be waiting for him inside the cabin, but his cock was half-erect and growing harder with each throbbing beat of his heart. He knew from past experience there was no denying it.

Besides—and he thought he knew this instinctively, above and beyond his hard-on—if she and her “gang” wanted to kill him, they likely would have tried by now.

He'd have made an easy target up on that bench behind the cabin, digging her brother's grave.

She leaned forward, watching him devilishly from beneath her blond eyebrows, and her breasts sloped away from her chest as she waggled her fanny once more, sliding her pink panties down her firm thighs and well-turned calves.

When she'd sent the drawers flying onto the pile with her other duds, Haskell had unbuttoned his shirt and kicked out of his boots. He tossed the garment down and then unbuckled his cartridge belt. He wasn't so horny that he was going to neglect his guns. He buckled the belt and hung it from a nail protruding from the cabin's front wall.

When he turned back to Dulcy, she stood about five feet away, creamy pale and wet and naked, holding his bowie knife in her hands. She'd removed it from the sheath in his right boot well.

“Careful, there,” Haskell said, his suspicions returning.

“Sharp.” Running her left thumb crossways across the blade, she narrowed one vaguely threatening eye at him.

As he peeled his gray tweed trousers off, he felt as though the point of the razor-edged bowie were pressing against the base of his scrotum. It made his lungs tight and his breath shallow. For some reason, it made his blood run even hotter.

There must have been some ancient memory far back in his male brain that made a naked blonde holding a large, sharp knife with a hide-wrapped horn handle especially alluring.

He tossed the trousers aside and peeled his summer-weight balbriggans down his arms and chest. The wet cloth clung to his skin. He grunted and groaned with the effort.

Holding the bowie in her hands, looking delectable there all wet and naked, Dulcy stared at his cock. Her lips parted. Haskell followed her gaze. Half of his engorged manhood was visible, standing up proudly out of the garment's fly, an eager-eyed rodent poking its head out of its den to check the female situation.

“Christ, you're hung like a Russian plow horse!”

Running to him, Dulcy reached over to wrap her hand around his cock, squeezing none too gently and giggling. And then she fumbled the door open and ran inside.

Haskell tossed his underwear down and started to follow her in. He stopped, reached around the open door, and grabbed his gun belt from the nail he'd hung it on, and then glanced around once more warily.

He could see nothing suspicious out in the rain- and wind-lashed yard.

The wind continued to howl and moan. Thunder crackled, and witches' fingers of lightning flashed out of the low, heavy clouds that had turned the summer afternoon into a murky twilight.

Haskell moved inside, drawing the door closed behind him. He was in the kitchen of the long, low cabin, divided into a parlor area on the right and a sleeping area on the left. Narrow stairs rose to the second story directly across the eating table before him, just to the right of the cooking range.

After the shabbiness of the yard, Bear was surprised at how neat the place was. Crudely, sparsely furnished, but everything seemed to have a place, and everything was in its place. The floor and walls had been whitewashed, making everything look bright and clean and fresh. The table was covered with a red-checked oilcloth and centered with a ceramic vase of white, cottony pussywillow branches.

Dulcy was shoving kindling into the firebox of the black range on the other side of the table from Haskell. As she worked, she glanced at him, and there again was that devilish gleam in her eyes framed by the wet curtains of her curly blond hair. Haskell walked naked around the table, his cock at full mast, and began plucking small branches from a peach crate beside the range.

Locking erotic gazes with the naked girl, whose round breasts rose and fell as she breathed, her arms covered in goose bumps from the sudden, damp chill, he shoved the branches into the firebox and reached for more.

When they had enough kindling in the range, Dulcy pulled a tin can stuffed with stove matches down from a shelf. She fired the match on the side of the range and crouched, breasts sloping, her hair brushing against Bear's naked left thigh. She touched the flame to the kindling. When the fire was going, she straightened, returned the match can to its shelf, and glanced again at Bear, who stood not a foot away from her.

She stretched her lips back from her teeth, her eyes sparking again, coy, teasing, and then she tucked her hair behind one ear, bent over, and closed her mouth over the head of his cock.

He gritted his teeth.

She slid her mouth down only a couple of teasing inches and then lifted it off of him, making a wet popping sound with her mouth, and laughed. She walked to the other end of the kitchen, and Haskell had to grab a chair back to steady himself.

His heart was thudding. He could still feel her wet mouth on the swollen head of his mast. For a few seconds, he feared he'd lose consciousness.

Long tendrils of smoldering desire were licking up the insides of his legs. His cock was so swollen he thought the skin would crack. He stared at the girl's round, plump ass as she rose onto her tiptoes and reached up to grab a corked bottle off a shelf.

Her hair hung down to the small of her back, one slender lock of it curling down to the top of her alluring butt crack. Haskell yearned to fill his hands with those two fleshy globes of her buttocks and shove his tongue deep between them, licking her asshole and pussy.

He fairly slathered at the thought of it and raked his hands through the curls of his thick, wet hair, pulling it back behind his forehead, tucking it behind his ears.

Dulcy swung around and walked toward him, prying the cork from the bottle with her teeth. She spit the cork out onto the table and tipped the bottle back. She lowered the bottle, and, her cheeks bulging with the liquid, her mouth closed, her lips forming a perfect small O, she groaned and rose up on her tiptoes.

She shoved her face toward Haskell and curled a beckoning finger at him.

Bear lowered his mouth to hers, pressed his lips against her lips. She opened her lips and pushed the fiery whiskey into his mouth with her tongue. Pulling his head away from hers, he swallowed.

Most of it plunged down his throat and into his chest and belly.

“Christ!”

His head swam. His heart turned a somersault in the swollen mushroom head of his cock. It was as if the very essence of the sexy girl herself had just rushed down his throat to throw even more fuel on his lust.

Dulcy laughed.

“Your turn,” she said, holding the bottle up to him.

When he'd filled his mouth with whiskey and spit it into her mouth, she slapped her hands to her chest and stepped back, swallowing, face flushing, eyes bulging.

Dulcy gasped and, regaining her wind, laughed again.

Then she crouched over his cock once more to kiss it.

Haskell groaned.

Dulcy looked up at him, her eyes dancing with wicked delight, and said, “Now I want you to fuck me with your bowie knife!”