High and Wild (17 page)

Miss O'Brien blinked at him. “That's amazing.”

“Ah, heck, it weren't nothin'.”

“No, you're much smarter than you look, aren't you?”

Haskell grinned and shrugged.

Suddenly, she hardened her jaws, grabbed his vest, and rose up onto her tiptoes. “Who are you here to kill?”

18

B
ear stared down at
the freckled redhead. He peeled her hand off his vest. “I ain't here to kill no one. What I am here to do is get a job. I need to eat, same as everyone else.”

“Yes, that's what you said earlier . . . right after you tracked dung onto my rug.”

“What I said was I was lookin' for my friend, Malcolm Briar. He said he had a job for me.”

“What kind of job?”

Haskell decided to let his finely honed instincts dictate and see where they took him. He saw little chance to waver from his initial plan, since he was for all intents and purposes back to square one. “Malcolm said there was trouble here in Wendigo. Trouble among the freighters. He wanted me to come and help him figure it out before somethin' bad happened. I could tell from his letter he was worried about his own fate and the fate of his company. Since I was so rudely waylaid by you and Goodthunder's deputies, I haven't had the opportunity to track him down.”

“When did he write you this letter?” she asked him, tapping her index finger on the rim of her snifter.

Haskell shrugged. “Hell, I don't know. A year ago or so. I was workin' then, didn't need the job. Now I do.”

She stared at him, not buying his story.

“How do you know Mr. Briar?”

“He and I fought in the war together.”

“What side?”

“Union blue.”

She searched him with a faintly skeptical cast. He didn't like how close she was standing to him, because he could see way down her well-filled corset, and it was distracting. He'd been distracted enough. He couldn't help glancing at the pearl necklace that dipped down into her freckled cleavage. He felt vaguely envious of the inanimate object.

She followed one of his glances to its target and then looked up again, her mouth corners quirking knowingly. “You like what you see down there, Bear?”

“I'd like to stay on the subject of Malcolm. You know where I might find him? I assume his freight yard is around here somewhere, but as I said, since I was so rudely—”

She placed her hand on his crotch. Her hand was soft and warm. She pressed it down firmly against his cock, staring up at him as though to check his reaction. He gritted his teeth, not wanting to feel the sensations he was feeling.

She gave him a smoky, devilish smile and then removed her hand. Fingering her necklace, she turned and walked over to stand in front of the fireplace and its dancing flames.

“He's dead,” she said, with her back to him, still fingering the necklace and staring down at the flames.

“Since I haven't heard from him in a while, I sort of had a feelin',” Haskell said to her back. “Who did it?”

Miss O'Brien turned to face him. “Goodthunder and that snake he's in cahoots with, Pink Cheatum.”

“Goodthunder and Pink Cheatum,” Haskell muttered half to himself. “Well, I know Goodthunder. Haven't had the pleasure of meeting this Pink Cheatum yet. Who is he?”

She flipped the necklace over her bosom a couple of times, and that faintly devilish smile returned to her full, sensuous lips. The lines at the corners of her eyes deepened slightly as she sipped from her glass and let her gaze flick to his crotch.

“You and I might have business to discuss, Mr. Haskell. That is, after all, why I asked you here and gave you back your guns.”

“What kind of business, Miss O'Brien?”

She walked slowly over to him, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. “No. Not yet. I don't like to mix business with pleasure.” She stopped within inches of him, her breasts rising and falling about an inch from his belly. “I like the pleasure to come first. Meet me upstairs? I have a lovely room with a magnificent bed in it.”

Haskell frowned. “I thought you and Benjamin Geist were . . .”

“Oh, we are. But he goes his way, and I go my way. To the horror of his unlovely daughter.” She smiled deviously. “Would you like to see how that works, exactly, Bear?” She chuckled as she pressed her bosom against his belly. “You sure are big. Might break my bed. That's all right”—she winked—“I can get another one.”

She walked over to the cabinet, picked up the bottle of Sam Clay, and started for the door to the foyer. Without looking back at him, she said, “Bring your glass, Bear. Come hither.”

She said that last with an amused air and a faint titter. Apparently, she thought him amusing. A circus bear. Maybe she'd even like to watch him straddle a tightrope.

Haskell stared at her, glowering. He didn't like her much. He liked the way she looked, and he was intrigued by the way she carried herself. He'd have bet a pocketful of silver she was good in the sack.

Still, he didn't like her much.

Oh, well. He'd endure the pleasure, and then he'd find out what this talk of business was all about. And then, if he had to pistol-whip the saucy bitch, he'd find out more about Malcolm Briar and the missing detective, Wexler.

As he headed for the door, he heard her out in the hall say to Samson with a lazy, arrogant drag to her voice, “If Benjamin calls this evening, tell him I have a headache. You and Rock stay on your toes, but unless the house is on fire, I don't want to be disturbed.”

She was already on the stairs by the time Haskell got out into the foyer. As he headed for the stairs behind her, Samson rose from his chair, holding his double-barreled gut shredder up high across his chest. “Hey, where you think you're goin'?” Owing to the fact that he no longer had any front teeth, he had a sissy's lisp.

Miss O'Brien stopped on the stairs and half-turned. “He's with me. Remember, Samson, not unless the house is on fire and only then if you can't put it out yourselves.”

Samson scowled oddly with his swollen eyes at Haskell, who grinned and threw his arms up as if to say, “What're you gonna do?”

Then he climbed the stairs behind Miss O'Brien, whom he idly thought he should start thinking of as Judith, since they were about get to know each other in the biblical sense and all, and found himself admiring her round ass, which appeared as firm as that of a woman ten years younger. He figured she was a few years older than he was, which would put her close to forty, old for a woman on the rough-hewn frontier.

She'd held up well. At least, with all her clothes on, she appeared to have.

They went all the way to the third story and down a carpeted hallway with two small candles burning in wall brackets. She opened a door, turned to him, pressed her hand on his chest, and gazed up at him with a coy smile. Then she stepped into the room and closed the door.

Haskell waited.

His heart throbbed in his scrotum.

The bitch had gotten to him. She was toying with him, and she knew he knew she was toying with him, and she was enjoying every minute of the devilish charade.

Sometimes it was damn hard being a male with all the foolishness a man must submit to simply because his cock insisted.

“Come,” she said quietly on the other side of the door.

Haskell walked in and closed the door behind him. There were four candles lit, casting more darkness than light. The room was opulently, expensively tricked out in baroque-style furniture dominated by a bed at the room's far end, with curtained windows to each side. The bed was about the size of two prairie schooners sitting side-by-side. It had a large black velvet canopy secured to the four tall posters.

Judith rolled a black spread and a heavy flowered quilt very neatly down to the foot of the bed in two long, tight rolls. She lay on her side, clad in only the pearl necklace, her chin in her hand. Her heavy breasts sloped toward the sheets, the top one touching the one beneath it.

She looked at him without expression.

Haskell's heart shuddered, rolled.

He stepped forward, doffed his hat, and, standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at her, he began unbuttoning his shirt. As he undressed, his breathing growing labored as he feasted his eyes on her, he saw that she was indeed beautiful.

Long-limbed, heavy-busted, every inch of her smooth skin lightly freckled, including her breasts. She had some extra flesh on her—a slight roll at the belly, some dimpled tallow at her hips and thighs—but just enough to add a sumptuous eroticism to her figure. The same for the shallow lines and creases.

Middle-aged women had a beauty all their own, far different from that of younger women. Much of it lay in the eyes. And it was Judith's jade-green eyes staring at him now with that hungry, faintly mocking arrogance and supreme insouciance of a she-cat that made his member throb. That as much as her tits or her full belly and thighs or the tuft of red hair peeking out from between her legs.

Middle-aged women were both a threat and a challenge to male pride, because they'd been through it all, and they knew the male of the species through and through. And they were less likely than younger women to be impressed or to put up with innate bullshit. They were less tolerant of merely giving satisfaction without being fulfilled themselves.

Haskell found himself hungry to dominate this beautiful bitch sprawled before him, mocking him with her eyes even after he'd stripped naked and his big cock was standing nearly straight up before him, nodding its swollen mushroom head with each thud of his heart.

She lay as before, not moving, chin resting on the heel of her hand, as he climbed onto the foot of the bed. He knelt at her feet and leaned forward and pressed his face to her right breast while squeezing the left one. He licked her nipple until it came to life beneath his tongue and slowly grew as hard as a sewing thimble. As he licked the other one the same way, she reached down and ran her fingers through his hair.

She said nothing. Her breasts began to rise and fall more sharply. He could hear each faint, long rasp of her breathing.

Finally, when he'd played with her breasts for nearly five minutes, rubbing his beard and mustache and tongue across them, she allowed him a pleased groan. She started to lie back and spread her legs, but he didn't allow her to.

Instead, he wrapped his right arm around her belly, at once turning her over onto her tits and pulling her up onto her hands and knees. Then he went down and licked her wonderfully large, round ass, lapping her asshole and her cunt like a dog licking a fresh bone to gain every ounce of flavor before it started gnawing.

“Oh.” She grunted, swallowing. “Oh . . . good . . .
Chris
t
!”

Haskell worked like a man interviewing for an especially hard-fought job. The male in him—that dark, mute, atavistic shadow at the core of his being—wanted to rise to her challenge. It wanted to dominate her, to gently hammer her into submission, to make her howl like a wolf bitch who would long remember the alpha who'd taken her and ruined her for every other male in the land.

Bear savored every minute of this well-seasoned woman in his arms, his own senses sparking to life as he knew hers were by her sighs and whispered exclamations and sporadic jerks and shudders. Then she started groaning and pulling at the sheets, and her cunt fairly dripped with her juices.

“All right—Bear, it's time, for chrissakes! Stick it
in
me!” She seethed at the headboard, two carved spools of which she squeezed in her clenched fists as she shook her head, her red hair tumbling down from the chignon to spill in thick clumps about her shoulders and back.

She looked like a woman being mercilessly whipped with braided leather. She glanced over her shoulder, and he grinned inwardly at the desperation in her eyes. She owned the harried, horrified countenance of a woman who'd seen a ghost.

“Fuck me!”

Haskell chuckled. “First, I'm gonna need the answers to a few questions.”

“I told you,” she groaned, flopping her head miserably, “I don't mix—”

“Oh, but I do.” Bear had two fingers in her snatch. He wasn't fucking her with them but just waggling them enough to keep her mewling and needing more. Much more.

“What is it, God damn it?” she said, her jaw hard.

“Are you sure Goodthunder killed Briar?”

She swallowed, grunted. “Of course I am! Please, Bear!”

“Why would he have killed Briar?”

“Because he's thrown in with Pink Cheatum. Cheatum owns a freighting business . . . and they're both . . . they're both former outlaws . . . still are! Oh, sweet fucking
Christ
, you are a
despicable
creature!”

“Have you lost any freight shipments?”

“Two so far. Two wagons. Two men. Twenty
mules
!” she screeched, panting and glancing over her shoulder at him again desperately. “But . . . but we're bound to lose more . . . with that madman on the loose! You can't lose much . . . without the mines . . . pulling out of your contracts. We'll be run into the ground!” She sucked a sharp breath, swallowed. “
Pleeeease
, I'll tell you anything else you want to know after you've
finished me
!”