Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5) (12 page)

Prophet moved the
stage off the main trail. He hid it behind rocks up the canyon,
near a runout spring, and picketed the bays there, as
well.

He
hadn’t wanted to move Sergei before, but now that his wounds were
tightly stitched and wrapped, Prophet rigged a travois using
rawhide straps and canvas. He eased the Russian off the trail, into
a pocket of shrubs and deep grass surrounded by boulders. There he
made a soft bed of pine boughs and grass, and the countess covered
the Cossack with a heavy blanket from the coach.

Prophet considered returning to the stage
station, only a few miles away, but nixed the
idea. He doubted Sergei could ride even that far.
Besides, the Cossack would be nearly as comfortable in the coach as
on one of Fergus’s cots.

Prophet buried the dead hardcases in shallow graves, well away
from the campsite. His next chore was to picket Mean and Ugly near
the bays, though far enough away that Mean couldn’t pick any
fights.

By the
time the sun had started falling, Prophet and the countess had
settled in to wait for Sergei’s fever to break. Prophet didn’t dare
move him far until he’d recovered some strength and had made up for
his blood loss.

“What
happened?” Prophet asked the countess as he washed from a wood
basin near the fire. It was the first time he’d mentioned the
attack directly.

She
was sitting beside Sergei, whose head was resting on the red
pillow. She’d drawn a blanket around her shoulders. There was a
forlorn, worried cast to her staring eyes.

Slowly
she said, “One of the men was in the coach. In the luggage boot. He
held a knife to my neck and made me order Sergei to stop. When the
coach stopped, Sergei climbed down to see what was wrong, and two
of the riders shot him as they rode out from the rocks along the
trail. Then the other man, the one-eyed man, took me back into the
coach . . .” Her jaws grew taut and her face flushed with anger as
she remembered. “They didn’t give Sergei a chance.”

“No,
they wouldn’t have.” Prophet told her about the other two who had
followed him away from the stage. “They wanted to separate
us.”

“They
must have wanted us pretty badly, no?”

Prophet
nodded.

He saw
no reason to add that it had been her they’d wanted, specifically,
as well as any valuables she was carrying. He figured she knew that
much, and that a rig like this, carrying only two people and half a
ton of steamer trunks, was bound to draw attention. No use getting
fresh about it again. It was her way, however asinine to him. He
hadn’t had to take the job, but now that he had, he couldn’t quit.
Finishing jobs he started, the circumstances be damned, was his
way.

“Are
you . . . okay?” he asked her timidly.

“He
did not rape me,” she told Prophet, gazing at him with candor. “But
he would have if you had not shown up when you did. And Sergei
would be dead. . . .”

Prophet toweled his face dry and donned his hat. “I’m just
sorry I didn’t check the stage out before you boarded. I should
have been expecting something like that.”

“You
can’t think of everything, Mr. Prophet.” It was the first time he’d
seen what passed for a smile on her face in hours. “You are a good
man to have around, as they say, in a fight.”

Prophet grunted
self-deprecatingly and poured a cup of coffee.

They
sat around the fire for the rest of the night, the countess
swabbing Sergei’s sweat-burning face with a wet cloth, Prophet
changing the bloody dressings every few hours.

They were sitting
there the next night and the next night, too.

Finally the Cossack drifted back to consciousness the
following morning, looking sheepish about how long he’d slept and
asking for food. The Russian’s appetite was a good sign, Prophet
figured, and the countess fed him several spoonfuls of oatmeal,
which he promptly vomited and then apologized for
vomiting.

“Don’t
be silly, Serge,” the countess said.

“A
Cossack doesn’t vomit in the presence of women,” Sergei
growled.

“What’s wrong with that?” Prophet said, trying to lighten the
mood. “American bounty hunters do it all the time.”

They
let the Russian doze the rest of the day. The next morning Prophet
decided Sergei was ready to ride in the coach, on the countess’s
bed. After dousing the breakfast fire and situating Sergei in the
coach. Prophet tied Mean to the luggage boot and climbed into the
driver’s box.

“You
know how to drive this thing, Lou?” Sergei called up from inside
the coach.

“Well,
if it was a six-mule team, I might have a problem,” Prophet called
back. “But since it’s just these four bays, I reckon I can keep us
on the trail. Hold on. You ready, Countess?”

“Ready, Mr. Prophet.”

“Lou.”

“Pardon?”

“Thought we agreed to first names?” Prophet released the brake
and turned the bays onto the trail.

“Oh,
yes,” the countess called. “Lou.”

“When
did you agree to first names?” Sergei asked
suspiciously.

“Never
mind, Russian,” Prophet said.

He grinned and
clucked the bays into a trot.

Slowly
the coach wound its way south
through New
Mexico, avoiding the major mountain ranges. Just as slowly, Sergei
regained his strength, until he was finally able to sit
up.

That
night he insisted he sleep on the ground, vacating the coach for
the countess. Prophet figured that sleeping in the coach while a
woman slept outside was just too much for the Cossack’s pride to
bear any longer.

Several days later, near the Arizona border, they stopped for
the night in the yard of an adobe trading post run by a fat Mexican
and his two buxom daughters, Nedra and Paulina. The man, whose name
was Juan Santos, was a sloppy, good-natured gent who welcomed the
company to his lonely outpost by roasting a whole javelina over an
outdoor fire.

The daughters
were pretty and smoky-eyed if a little heavy in the hips. Paulina
hovered around Sergei during the meal, which they ate at a
rough-hewn table near the fire. The girl was obviously enamored of
the big Cossack, whose accent and military bearing she found
amusing.

Several times she asked Sergei if she could
caress his goatee, for she’d never seen one so
thick and black and neatly trimmed. While Prophet had seen the
Cossack appraising the girl lustily, he denied her request,
flushing with embarrassment.

“If
you want to sleep with one of my daughters, or even both,” Juan
Santos told the Cossack as he sipped from his wineglass, “it will
cost you only one dollar for the oldest, Paulina, and two dollars
for Nedra.”

Prophet and the
countess glanced at Sergei. The countess arched her eyebrows.
Prophet grinned and nudged the Cossack with an elbow.

Formal
as always, Sergei cleared his throat and lowered his eyes to his
plate. “Uh . . . no. I thank you, sir.”

Across the table
the girls squealed with laughter.

Later
that night, drunk on the Mexican’s wine. Prophet and Sergei sacked
out in the adobe barn while the countess made her bed, as usual, in
the coach. Prophet had just drifted off to sleep despite the
bleating goats, when he heard rustling near him in the stall which
he and the Cossack shared. Moonlight slanted through the crumbling
adobe walls, revealing the Cossack bent over and quietly stepping
into his boots.

A few
seconds later Sergei donned his hat, went to the barn’s main door,
opened it quietly, and stepped out. He closed the door softly
behind him.

Prophet bit his cheeky curious. Where in the hell was the
Russian off to? He wouldn’t have needed his boots and hat just to
relieve himself.

His
curiosity getting the best of him, as well as his suspicions.
Prophet went to the door and cracked it. Sergei was walking toward
the trading post huddled in the moonlight, the milky light
reflecting off the brush arbor out front. Nearby, the cook fire
sputtered and sighed as it died.

Sergei mounted
the porch steps and slipped furtively into the cabin.

“Well,
I’ll be damned,” Prophet said through a grin. “He’s going after
that pretty Mex girl. Or both of ‘em.” Prophet’s grin widened as he
stared at the dark trading post and shook his head. “That Russian
dog.”

Then a
thought occurred to him. He turned his gaze right, where the coach
sat before the brush corral in which their horses as well as
several of Santos’s cayuses milled. The stage was dark, which meant
the countess had finished her nightly reading and gone to
bed.

Prophet grabbed his hat from the stall and dressed in his
jeans. Bare-chested and -footed, he left the barn and headed for
the coach, avoiding the chicken and goat dung littering the
hay-strewn yard.

He tapped on the
coach door.

No
answer.

He
tapped harder. “Countess?”

Rustling sounded within; the thorough-braces squawked as the
coach rocked slightly. “What is it? Who is there?”

“The
tooth fairy.”

“Lou?
What do you want?”

“Same
thing you want.”

Prophet opened
the door and climbed into the coach. He pulled the door closed
behind him. Then he turned to where he could vaguely see the dark
shape of the countess reclining on her bed heaped with tasseled
pillows and gold-trimmed blankets.

He sat on the
edge of the bed and began removing his jeans, an awkward maneuver
in such close quarters.

“What
are you . . . what are you doing?” the countess asked with quiet
bewilderment.

“I’m
about to give you what you been wantin’ and I been needin’,”
Prophet said with a grunt as he finally got his left leg free of
the jeans. He turned to the countess. “Slide over.”

“You
are drunk.”

“I
been drunker. Slide over.”

She
didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then she whispered, “Where
is Sergei?”

“In
the trading post.”

“What?” It sounded like she was smiling.

“He
went to visit those Mexican gals, I reckon. I think we’ll be safe
for a little while.”

“Lou
Prophet, what makes you think you can barge your way into a lady’s
boudoir and order her to make love with you?”

“The
way you’re lookin’ at me now,” he said, standing nude before the
bed. He grinned. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside the
coach, and he saw her smile.

“You
could take off your hat,” she said, throwing the blanket back and
sliding over a few inches.

Prophet tossed
his hat away with a quiet victory whoop and crawled into the bed.
He wasted no time peeling the straps of her nightgown down her
shoulders, planting his lips on her round breasts, and kissing the
stiffening nipples hungrily.

She stifled a
scream, throwing her head back, shivering beneath his touch,
rubbing her hands brusquely through his hair.

He
massaged and kissed her breasts and ran his tongue down her legs,
pausing to explore her nooks and crannies, taking his time. When
she fairly growled with passion and kicked the nightgown away, he
mounted her and nuzzled her neck. She clutched at his back with her
arms and legs and groaned as he entered her, mumbling something he
thought was Russian though he wasn’t paying much attention to
anything but their ravenous coupling.

This
was a hungry woman — a Russian thoroughbred — who hadn’t had a man
in a long time. As the thorough braces rocked beneath him, he had a
feeling he wouldn’t be leaving the coach anytime soon . . . and
that didn’t bother him a bit.

The
next couple of hours passed as if in a heady, erotic dream. Then he
slept like the dead, the countess’s long, sweaty limbs entwined
with his.

When
he opened his eyes, it was still dark. He heard the thorough braces
creak and realized what had awakened him. The countess was kneeling
before the window facing the trading post, peering through the
half-raised shade. Her hair fell down her slender back.

He was reaching
out to run his fingers lightly down her spine to her buttocks, when
she turned her head sharply toward him.

“Sergei,” she said, her whisper shrill with alarm. “He is
coming!”

“Huh?”
Prophet said, blinking groggily as he gently massaged her smoothly
curving hip. “So?”

“Please, Lou — you must go!”

“Hey,
we’re all grown-ups here, ain’t we?”

“No,
you do not understand,” she said, tugging on his arm. “My mother
made Sergei promise to keep me chaste until I married. He must kill
any man who dishonors me!”

“Oh,
shit.” What was it with Russians and honor? Prophet jumped up,
grabbed his clothes, and scrambled out the door. Keeping the coach
between himself and the trading post, he ran through the corral and
entered the barn through the rear door.

The startled
goats bleated and kicked their stalls as Prophet jogged, wearing
only his hat and clutching his jeans in his arms, to the stall
containing his bedroll.

Outside, Sergei glanced at the stage, dark under a milky sheen
of moonlight on its roof. The countess slept peacefully. Sergei
smiled. In spite of the ache of his healing bullet wound,
aggravated by the rambunctious Mexican girls, he felt not only
content but fulfilled. The images of the two lovely senoritas
danced in his head as they had danced over and under him for the
past two hours — all breasts and hair and legs and lips — while
Juan Carlos snored in his lean-to room off the kitchen.

The
Cossack had always thought the women of his own blood were the most
bewitching lovers, but he didn’t mind giving credit where credit
was due. A Mexican girl could, as they said out here in the West,
“haul his ashes” anytime.

He
paused to scrutinize the coach, remembering that, in his desire, he
had left the countess and Lou Prophet unattended. Shame pricked at
the Cossack. Who knows what the American bounty hunter might have
tried in his absence. Remembering the oath he had sworn to the
countess’s mother, he listened for telltale noises within the
coach. Hearing nothing, he strode quickly to the barn. If Prophet
was not in the barn, where Sergei had left him . . .

Jaws
clenched tightly and his blood hammering in his temples, Sergei
placed one hand on his dagger and made for the barn. Quietly he
tripped the leather latch on the barn door, and stole inside. Just
as quietly, he closed the door behind him. Blindly he fumbled
through the darkness until he’d found the stall where he and the
bounty hunter had bedded down.

He
stopped and listened. His chest lightened when he heard Prophet’s
raspy breathing and low, muffled snores. He heaved a silent sigh of
relief.

He was
kicking out of his boots when Prophet’s snores ceased.
“Sergei?”

The
Cossack muttered a Russian curse. He’d hoped the bounty hunter
wouldn’t wake up and discover Serge’s shameful tryst with the
Mexican girls. “Yes ... it is only I.”

“What
are you doin’ up at this hour?” Prophet asked.

The
Russian’s heart quickened with embarrassment. His mind raced for an
excuse.
“I was just — how do you always
say? —
‘shaking the dew from my lily.’
“

“Oh, I
see,” Prophet said, rolling over on his blanket. Grinning, he added
under his breath, “I bet it was one hell of a shake.”