Working the Lode (9 page)

Cormack grinned as they dragged Quartus through the waist-high creek. Quartus was not a bad sort, really—he was certainly harmless, and he was strong enough to help them shovel gravel from the river, though he could not throw anything plumb center and he flung about rocks right smart. Because Quartus’ legs refused to work and they each had a horse to lead, Quartus nearly wound up burbling creek water through his livery lips. The iciness seemed to wake him up, though, and by the time they reached the campfire, he was cheerfully greeting the men he recognized from the mill with an effervescent “Howdy, brother!” Cormack picketed the two horses round the fire while Quartus took possession of his drum and fell to with a vengeance, madly drumming out his unexpended passion on the deerskin.

“There’s white man sign by the road from the fort,” Cormack told Erskine. “I scented beef grilling. Let’s leave a sentry to guard the horses tonight. I elect Sly.” He gestured at the only man not drinking whiskey.

Erskine frowned. “There’s sign about? You know the sign of Injuns slick, but Digger Indians would never be chawing beef. How could they afford it?”

Cormack looked off distantly, as though he could see the opposite hillside. “It’s not Diggers I’m thinking of.” He paused, trying to gain more white man sign, but then Zelnora was at his side, leaning into him. Putting a protective arm around her, he kissed her on the forehead, lingering for a long moment as the men about them babbled to be heard over the din of Quartus’ drumming.

“Let’s go to my tent,” he murmured in her ear, and by answer, she nuzzled his neck and bit him alongside his jugular vein, sending shivers down his spine that stiffened his cock.

“Well, that isn’t helping guard the horses!” Erskine called when they struck toward the canvas tent. Cormack spun around to see Erskine pointing at the flailing arms of Quartus, drumming so furiously he was a blur in the flickering campfire flames.

“Give him some bug juice!” Zelnora called.

Inside the tent, Cormack had fashioned a bed of soft pine branches covered with his buffalo robe. Today he had cut drains around the tent to prevent the wet reaching them, and over a large flat stone placed a Navajo blanket impervious to all rain. He divested himself of his pouch, powder horn, and boots, which he put near the bed with his rifle. He lit a tallow candle.

She kneeled on the buffalo robe, removing the shawl that had protected her from the chill that came suddenly when the sun set in those parts. How she loved to grip his shirtfront in her little fists! “Cormack,” she purred, her features also going all feline as she scrunched her shoulders and became a ladylike ball of sensual awareness, emanating attar of roses. She sucked his lower lip, bringing his prick to immediate attention against her lap as they kneeled together. “I want to pleasure you. You’re always pleasing me, I don’t know why. Those men cannot hear us with that racket going on. I want to suck on your delicious hefty cock till I swallow every drop of your semen.”

“I try to be gentle and tender with you.”
Gentle and tender, be dogged.
“You seem to be accustomed to being taken like an animal. But you’re a gorgeous, delicate mountain flower, and shouldn’t be bruised.” This luscious woman rotating her hips against his prick was nearly bringing him off, her breasts warm against his chest.

“Yes, I am unaccustomed to tenderness in a man,” she admitted petulantly, then yanked up the bottom hem of his fringed shirt. “But I’ll not break, you old hoss. Take this off. I want to feel your bare chest against me.”

“Is that why you bought Quartus the drum?” Cormack murmured as he allowed Zelnora to whip his buckskin and cotton shirts over his head in one swift motion.

“Yes, that’s why.” She nearly knocked the air from his lungs when she flung her arms around his torso and smashed the mounds of her breasts flat against him. She kissed him deeply, chewing on his lower lip, licking the backs of his teeth with her sweetly formed mouth. Cormack’s prick was up like a hammer against her lap, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold out this time. When she deftly undid the buttons of his buckskins and slid her hand down the plane of his belly, he nearly went out of his head.

She had never touched his cock, though she’d often proclaimed it to be thick, long, and straight. The first slight feel of her long fingers playing an adagio on the underside of it had Cormack gasping for air—he wouldn’t last long in an experienced grasp such as that. She loved the bursting head of it with her palm, using her thumb to rub the slime at the tip, rotating it around and around the bulbous head until he panted and gulped air. Tiny clear bubbles floated before his eyes as he pumped his hips into her, yanking down the broadfall of his pantaloons so his cock could swing freely.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she muttered against his mouth, “you are the most well-hung stallion I’ve ever had the pleasure to hold in my hand.”

Ho, boy, he was gut-shot. Grabbing her about the waist, he flung her back onto the buffalo robe and straddled her. Thick squiggles of her shiny hair spread onto the robe, her face a beatific white oval in a sea of curls and animal fur. She stroked his cock, which loomed immensely, throbbing with its own pulse, gleaming and purplish in his arousal.

“You’ll not mind if I’m not so gentle from now on.” Cormack slid her skirts up her thighs and hitched his fingertips under the hem of her stockings to draw them down—he’d never felt her bare legs wrapped around him before.

But she cried “No!” and lunged forward, arms enfolding his ass, and swallowed his prick.

She just gobbled it up like mad, as though it were a turkey leg!

“No,” he groaned, one long-drawn-out sound from the pit of his stomach. He cradled the back of her skull, driving his prick down her throat. She wanted to pleasure him; that heap of fat meat would definitely shine in most normal sprees. But this wasn’t a normal spree by any means, and as he felt her throat muscles contract around the tip of his cock, her puffs of hot air against his pubic bone coming strangled and frantic, he realized he was about to spill his load down her gullet, and he forced her away, pressing against her shoulders.

She detached with a great sound of suction, her surprised round eyes full of awe as her torso hit the buffalo robe. From the waist down, she squirmed like a worm on a fishing hook, and Cormack panted, his cock elongated to such lengths as he’d never viewed it before, throbbing in the air over her bare, mounded breasts.

“Old hoss,” she breathed in wonderment, gripping his cock in her fist. “Now I know why they call you a hoss.” She looked to be grinning a bit when she said, “You’re a tall, beautifully shaped roan stallion.”

He hovered over her, balanced with elbows on either side of her head. Brushing her mouth with his, he murmured, “Ho, boy. And I’m in a horn-tossing mood, Zelnora, my mountain flower.”

She gripped his cock and slid it into her burning hot pussy. She encircled his waist in her long legs as she pushed her stockings down to feel his bare skin against her calves. Zelnora wasn’t recently accustomed to being used, that he could tell from the tight, slick pussy walls that gripped him like a constricting snake, but she was wide open as the starry sky above, her open mouth plastered to his. Cormack was glad she was truthful that Brannagh had not fucked her, and the thought that he was first sent a fresh wave of lust down his spine and into his balls. He humped her in such long, sweeping strokes that soon he was banging her tailbone up against the flat rock that served as a pillow, the rod of his erection pinning her to the Navajo blanket.

She allowed herself to be handled with ease, not one peg of resistance in any bone in her body. He hunched over her like a mad, famished barbarian while she threw her head back over the edge of the rock, exposing her throat to his feral slurping. She was so wide open that her toes dug into the small of his back in some acrobatic feat. All at once, he came, unable to hold back any longer, erupting giant spurts of ejaculate against the mouth of her womb.

All thought and awareness of the tent around him vanished. He knew he let out low strangled sounds like a foaming bison rutting as he speared her to the robe, semen overflowing her snug pussy and spilling onto the animal fur. Jerking uncontrollably, he dumped load after load into her—as though he had not frigged himself daily since meeting her! He choked, nearly sobbing in disbelief that his body could react like such a lascivious beast, merely by fucking the woman he’d desired more than anyone in a decade.

Ho, boy, he’d best let her breathe. Cormack rolled off of her, collapsing on his back. His cock moved slowly against his hip like an enormous slug. With a distinct absence of vigor, he shoved it back inside his pantaloons. When they had caught their breaths, Zelnora flung herself on top of his chest, her ear to his heart as though listening to the pounding.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he murmured.

He could feel her smile. “Not at all. I have never enjoyed such a vigorous fucking. You have…an immense amount of talent. You may be a hulking hoss, but I am a lusty brood mare.
Oh!
” Sitting up with hand to her bared breasts, she seemed taken aback. “I didn’t mean for you to think…” In her shame, she covered her breasts with her Californio
camisita,
and her hand moved to tug her skirts back down. Smearing her palm over her face as though to wipe away her embarrassment, she finally whispered, “…to think that I was capable of…immediately becoming with child…”

Cormack languidly raised himself on one elbow and regarded her.
‘Capable’? ‘Immediately’?
“What are you referring to, Zelnora? Pregnancy?”

She did not look him in the eye. “Fertility, yes. I believe I mentioned I was divorced. Well…Barton Sparks divorced me because after two years I was not able to give him a child.” She chuckled at the horror. “I discovered he had abandoned me by reading his name on a passenger list, a ship sailing to Van Diemen’s Land with another woman from our mission…A woman who already had one child. I tell you this because if you wish for wee nippers to run about—you’re about the right age when a man starts wanting that—with me, that will not happen. It’s only fair for me to tell you the facts now. However,” she brightened then, leaning forward and caressing the side of his face, “if you are of the sporting type who wants no fixed abode or a family to prevent his travels, then I am certainly ideal.”

Did she really mean she just wished to sport? More than likely, she would have sported with a man since that odious Barton, if indeed that newspaper fellow preferred to box the Jesuit with other mens’ cocks. Sitting upright, Cormack stayed her hand by grabbing her wrist. “Wait a minute, Zelnora. How do you know it wasn’t the fault of
his
sperm?”

She drew herself up, looking down her nose at him, shocked. “His…fault? How can that be?”

“It can be. This child knows that. There are many things you can do if you think it is the fault of your own ovaries, however, many teas you can drink, things you can eat.”

Zelnora regarded him with pity. “Oh, some mountain man Indian remedies? I do believe I have tried almost all of those herbal things.” She frowned. “Are you saying you wish me to become fertile?”

Cormack gathered her to him. “I’m saying…The happiest moments of my life have been in the wilderness of the Far West. I recall with pleasure my solitary camp with no closer, more faithful friend than my rifle…no
compañeros
more sociable than my good horses. I needed that solitude because I was…accustomed to it. I’ve trapped in heaven, in earth, and hell—I’ve seen a petrified forest, as sure as my rifle’s got hindsights. But that way of life has gone under, Zelnora, and hurrah for womanly doings. This child’s getting old. You’re some pumpkins, and I’ve never seen nothing as could beat you. The settlements are the only place for an old hard case such as I. A woman’s breast is the hardest kind of rock to me.”

He saw she was smiling, misty-eyed at his flowery monologue, so he supposed it was agreeable to her. He was sincere—he wanted her face about his lodge for the rest of his days, and together, with her know-how and his brawn, they could mine enough gold to retire for those days. However, his mouth had a different mind, and he soon heard it saying softly, “I love you, Zelnora Sparks.”

To cover up his shock at this utterance, he was about to kiss her when there came a loud affray from over by the campfire. Men screamed high-pitched like women, and bodies thumped against the sand. Leaping for his rifle, he upped it through the tent flap, but there were no raiders or coyotes, only a bunch of fellows kneeling over the prone body of Nutting from the mill.

“Stay here!” he commanded Zelnora, surprised to see she had her own pocket pistol in her hand.