Karen Mercury (10 page)

Thunk
. Both men stood stock-still, panting, Chess’s prick pulsating deep inside Spenser.

It was a heavy, wooden sound, and maybe the twang of a guitar, and they both whipped their heads to face the door that led into Freund’s store.

And saw a flash of Fidelia’s braided bun before she fled down the hall.

“You jackass!” Chess roared, immediately dropping his hold on Spenser’s cock and withdrawing his erection from his ass. “She just saw us fucking. What’s she going to think of us now? She’s not going to court either one of us!”

Chess had already splashed his cock with water from a jug and done up his denim buttons, but Spenser still dangled from the beam. “Has it occurred to you,” Spenser said lightly, “it might
increase
her desire to court us? Let me down!”

That Ezekiel Vipham fellow who often came by the Morning Star Gallery told Fidelia that Spenser and Chess were in the back storeroom. She wanted her damned pocket pistol back from that bon vivant Chess Hudson now that he knew she wouldn’t use it against him.

“Yeah, yeah.” Zeke was laughing to the Freund brother. “That’s Chess Hudson, all right. He of the infamous Spanish fly Tower of Power incident in London.”

The Freund brother’s jaw hung low. “Really? Was he really smoking a hookah? But this fellow looks much slimmer than the slob in the
newspaper illustration.”

Fidelia saw something funny before she went down the hallway. Bullet Bob came out of the woodwork from where he’d apparently been hiding behind a stack of Indian blankets. It seems he’d been waiting for Zeke to turn his back to the room to make his move. Zeke’s attention was distracted by some glittering glass trade beads, and that’s when Bullet Bob swooped in and snatched up the enormous Californio spurs Chess had no doubt left on the counter, along with a handsome and expensive beige Stetson hat. He stole out the front door clutching them, looking this way and that like a spy.

Instantly, Ulrich’s prophetic lyrics came into Fidelia’s mind.

The killer likes to fancy himself a connoisseur

Since he drinks absinthe and wears the giant spurs

Could Bullet Bob be the culprit she was searching for? Fidelia didn’t have much time to ponder, though, for she came to the storeroom door. She was only able to shove the door open a few inches before it touched a cask of some sort, but that was enough room to witness the most incredible and stimulating scene of her entire pathetic life.

Chess had told her that Spenser was “his only friend in town,” and she had already witnessed them smooching in the bathhouse, but this…this went beyond even any sort of
ein Schwuler
carousing Fidelia had ever dared to imagine in her life.

That satyr Chess had strung Spenser up to a beam by the leather cuffs around Spenser’s wrists. Maybe he had heeded what she’d said about the rope marks being brutal and mean. True, Spenser didn’t seem to be struggling as Chess smacked his bare ass with a leather quirt. Spenser’s penis stuck out stiffly, shiny and purplish, and instantly Fidelia’s muff became moist, sort of fluttering between her thighs.

“I swear, Chess,” Spenser gasped as Chess spanked his rump. “I saw this dastardly clown wearing a half-assed porkpie hat, and he plays a guitar and sings.”

Fidelia couldn’t care less that Spenser was telling Chess about Ulrich. She became more aroused when Chess slid a hand down Spenser’s lean abdomen and grabbed ahold of the bush above the jutting cock.

“You think it’s funny lying to me like that?” Chess accused.

Fidelia now knew they were only pretending, acting out their roles, and they were both sincerely taking enjoyment from their parts. Chess humped Spenser’s bare hip with his stupendous limb of a cock, and Fidelia weakly clung to the doorjamb, not daring to breathe. Every time Chess slapped the rounded, shapely ass, Fidelia’s muff quivered with excitement.

She should not be feeling this way. She didn’t
want
to feel this way.

She had been whacked enough times at the Gottfried’s farm in Wisconsin. Herr Gottfried was a terrible taskmaster, just a mean, surly bastard.
Der mann war ekelerregend
. The man was repulsive. Gottfried was the epitome of a
Kotzbrocken
bastard, taking any excuse to throw Fidelia over his knee and whack away at her backside. He never did that to Ulrich—only to her—and this seemed to earn Fidelia the especial hatred of Gottfried’s wife.

Sure, she was an indentured servant. They could do what they liked. But when Ulrich’s ghost had urged her to run to Laramie, she had taken the opportunity.

Now, as she watched Chess unveil his own prick, which she already knew to be a formidable weapon, she felt a drip of moisture run down her inner thigh. She barely listened to Chess’s nasty, overbearing words as he jammed the first few inches of that tool up Spenser’s rectum. “I’ll teach you to lie, boy. Your sweet, meaty ass has got me all riled up.”

Well, their rutting was certainly getting
her
all riled up.

She didn’t want this! These men—well, Chess at least—were not
ein Schwuler!
Not really, anyway. Chess had kissed her last night, a deep and talented kiss, and the erection he had pressed against her lap was not faked.

Fidelia had heard of a certain
mannmännlichen liebe
, a man-male love where some men enjoyed toying with both women and men. That was probably the case here, as Chess now gripped Spenser’s penis, which he had tied taut with a blue bandanna, and stroked him lovingly. Fidelia realized she was panting, steaming up the wooden doorjamb where her face was pressed. When Chess began to fuck his friend in earnest while smacking the reddened ass, Fidelia began to feel light-headed.

“Take this, boy. Take my big stallion’s cock up your sweet, slick ass.”

Mein Gott im Himmel
. This was too much. Fidelia was completely inexperienced in any method of relieving the flood of blood that filled her pelvis. She had known women could masturbate, but why would she have ever bothered? Her life had always been too filled with misery, pain, or death. Now here were the two most masculine men she had bothered paying attention to in years, one mounting the other and fucking his frustrations and arousal out—while pleasuring the other, as well.

A sigh of desire escaped her lips just as Ulrich’s guitar twanged behind her. She jumped so suddenly with fright that she knocked the door against the cask, and the men abruptly stopped fucking. Twirling, she saw Ulrich standing in the hallway wearing that ridiculous porkpie hat, his left hand on the guitar neck, shaped in a
C
chord as he sang out,

Chess Hudson is a fancy man, he likes to hump the dolls

But when he’s fired he often strays, and sometimes slaps the balls

“Oh!” Fidelia exhaled with irritation and fled down the hallway. “
Du verdammter
idiot!
“ she whispered at her brother’s image, shoving it aside as though it were, indeed, a clown advertising a manhood restoration potion.
That damned idiot!
If Ulrich thought Chess was meant to be her husband, why was he doing everything in his power to ruin it?

She raced out the back door of Freund’s store and into an alley, running blindly for about a block before she stopped. She leaned, panting, against a sooty wall. She panted not from the short run, of which she was entirely capable without running out of breath. She panted because of what she had witnessed.

Oh, nein
. Sensations and images of Wolfgang Engel came rushing back at Fidelia. Excitement and shame washed over her to recall her first and only love. She had met him a few years after arriving at Gottfried’s farm ten years earlier. She had never felt carnal attraction to anyone before, considering her life to be devoted to drudgery and misery. She had been sent from Stuttgart, unwanted by her parents, sent to slave for this
Kotzbrocken
, Gottfried, who could thrash her any time the mood struck him.

Then Wolfgang had come by the farm to buy a lot of milk. Or butter, or something, Fidelia couldn’t recall what, she had been so bowled over by his charm and grace. Since a servant wasn’t supposed to indulge in an affair with an upstanding merchant, they had their exciting and secretive assignations in all sorts of odd places. For an entire year she had felt free, light, feminine. To this day, the smell of hay brought Wolfgang to mind, as they had often made love in haystacks. She was the ultimate German milkmaid lounging in a haystack with her breasts displayed, the blond and stalwart Wolfgang nursing at her to his heart’s content.

But what to do now? She wanted her derringer back from Chess, and his lover Spenser was helping her track down Ulrich’s killer. She could not avoid the men, but every time she saw them, would she become moist and slick between the thighs like this?

Fidelia didn’t have much time to ponder because she heard heavy boots running down the alley toward her. Chess.
“Fidelia!” he called.
He jogged perfectly athletically now that he wasn’t wearing the hairy chaps, and Fidelia spun about to find the closest door.

It turned out to be a door covered only with a heavy oriental hanging, but she rushed behind it, immediately plunged into a dark, incense-filled hallway. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she felt around for anything that would guide her to the front of the store and out onto the street, but all she felt was barrel after barrel full of aromatic, pungent roots and powders. She stuck her hand into a powder that smelled of dust and made her entire hand appear a vivid yellow.

Now she thought she saw a light beyond another silk hanging and she started for it, but Chess was faster. Suddenly he was so close he practically stood on her slippers, and he gripped her arm and twirled her to face him.

“Fidelia!” he gasped.

She was pressed against something hard yet furry at about hip level. Chess was so insistent she could not make a break for the tapestry with the light behind it, where frankincense drifted into the back hallway. He took her by the shoulders, and there was an insistent ardor in his eyes.

“Fidelia. I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression. I don’t want you fleeing from me in horror. I cannot apologize enough for forcing you to witness such an unsavory scene.”

But the scene wasn’t unsavory
.
I want this man.
Fidelia crawled up the hard, furry object because it was the only direction to squirm away from Chess. His powerful brawn hit her frontally like a brick house, and she realized she was sitting on the back of an enormous stuffed tiger. “Mr. Hudson. I am not shocked or repelled—”

“Call me Chess, please, my dove. Oh, Fidelia, Fidelia. How my heart sings when I think of you. Why have you captivated me so? It crushes me to think you’ve formed the wrong impression of me. I’m not a ganymede, although I may have committed many crimes against nature in my debauched past. But I’m a changed man since meeting you. I know it sounds like the words of a charming liar with nothing to lose and everything to gain, but ever since you broke into my hotel room I’ve been completely swept away by you.”

“Chess,” Fidelia gasped. One of her slippers against the tiger’s hind leg propped her up, and Chess smashed her to the wall above the tiger. If she clung to his shoulders, her other foot didn’t need to touch the floor at all. With an enormous rush of lust, she realized Chess’s abundant crotch strained against her muff. He made tiny swivels of his hips, just enough to tease and rotate against her swollen clitoris. “I do not think it’s disgusting, what I saw.”

She knew he had been aroused with Spenser but had not spent. The scent of an aroused man rushed back to her with freshness, as if it were only yesterday she had romped in the haystacks with Wolfgang. She wound her fingers through Chess’s damp pigtail and massaged his skull, releasing that musky fragrance of the stimulated man. Her inner pussy clenched and quivered in carnal anticipation.

“I implore you to give me a chance,” Chess begged. “I can give up Spenser. He means nothing to me. We merely have the rutting, base, animal instincts of two masculine bucks who cannot control themselves—”

Fidelia kissed him then. She pressed her open mouth to his and slid her tongue into his mouth just to shut him up.

She didn’t want to hear his apologies. He had nothing to apologize for. She liked Spenser, and he didn’t need to give him up. It had inflamed her to untold heights to watch the two men go at it, and it was a different, and more potent, sort of lust than the attraction she had felt for Wolfgang.

Now she was free of restraint, and it was a glorious freedom! Oh, how wonderful it was, feasting on his mouth! But instantly she wanted more. Ten years of restraint had finally snapped her, and she kissed him like a deranged woman, grunting and squeaking like the joists of a wooden ship in a storm.

Chess showed no restraint either. All his flowery claims about fighting Spenser for her hand went out the window as he clutched her voluptuous figure to him. He bent over her, cradling her to his muscular torso, swiveling his hips against her. They devoured each other with such sudden lust they did not come up for air, and Fidelia surprised herself by frantically slipping his shirt buttons undone.