Wild to the Bone (9 page)

10

I
n the dim hallway,
Raven shook her hair back, composing herself, and said, “My deep sleep must have been the result of the train ride and having to rescue you—again—from that gent with the pearl-gripped Colts.”

Haskell grumbled. “Yeah, well, if you think I'm gonna fall over backward thanking you, you got another think comin'. I was about to pop a pill through that fool's head. So all you really did was save me a bullet and the bastard his life.”

“Oh, it's
his
life I saved,” she said with a sneering air, and stepped out of her room. She was fully dressed, wearing her tan Stetson with its chin thong dangling down across her breasts, a pair of saddlebags slung over one shoulder, a fringed buckskin jacket over the other shoulder.

She wore tanned elk-hide chaps over her form-defining denims. Bear couldn't help liking the way she wore the breeches and everything else, including the blouse, which was just tight enough to show off the proud mounds of her jutting breasts. She had the first three buttons undone, and a turquoise-crusted silver medallion dangled against her chest, just above her deep, alluring cleavage.

He hoped she hadn't seen him raking his eyes over her, feasting on her, as he said in a faintly mocking tone, “Yeah, it's his life you saved. But let's not start trading barbs. We got a two-day ride to Spotted Horse, and your smart mouth will only make it longer.”

“
My
smart—?”

He groaned and continued walking down the hall. She caught up to him at the top of the stairs, but before she could resume her tirade, he said, “Up early, ain't ya, Agent York?”

As they descended the rickety staircase together, she released a held breath as though trying to sooth her nerves. Moderating her tone, she said, “Yes, I am up early. As are you, I see, Agent Haskell.”

“Yeah, I thought it wouldn't hurt to get a jump on the day. Figured I'd go out, get some breakfast, rent us a couple horses, and then come and bang a tin cup against your door. Figured that'd be the only way to wake you up so early.” He chuckled.

“Here I figured I'd have to do the same to you,” Raven said. “But please let it be noted that I'll pick out my own horse.”

“Oh, fine judge of . . .”

Haskell let his voice trail off as they reached the lobby, in which the old lady who ran the place, her coarse gray hair pulled back and wrapped in a tight bun, stopped sweeping by the light of a single oil lamp and scrutinized the pair dubiously.

“Good morning, Mrs. Larson,” Raven said. “I'll be pulling out. Had a wonderful night's—”

“Young lady, do you know this man?” the old woman said, glowering up at Haskell.

He and Raven stopped near the front door, which the old woman had propped open with a cream can to catch the fresh dawn breeze. Raven looked up at him. “Indeed, I do,” she said in a droll tone.

“Young lady, should you be traveling alone with this unheeled character? If you ask me, he looks mossy as a Brasada bull, and you—well, you're just so purty an' sweet. I know it's none of my dang business, but you oughtta have you a chaperone!”

“I couldn't agree more,” Raven said, giving Haskell another ironic glance. “But rest assured, Mrs. Larson, I can take care of myself. Why, if this big rascal makes one bold move, I'll twist his horns back but good!”

“You see you do!” the old woman crowed as Haskell and Raven walked out onto the hotel's front stoop. “And mister, you mind your manners. If I hear otherwise, I'll take my old greener after your cussed behind!”

“Will do, Mrs. Larson,” Haskell intoned good-naturedly, pinching his hat brim at the old gal as he moved down the steps and into the street. To Raven, he said, “Boy, you sure trained her in a hurry!”

“Isn't she sweet?”

T
hey ate in the
same café that Haskell had supped in the night before. The place opened at four to serve the early-rising ranch crowd, although there was no crowd in the place this morning, only a gray-headed old gent in a worn black suit who Haskell figured was probably either the local attorney or the sawbones.

The café was run by a small, humpbacked Mexican and his full-hipped wife in a bright green dress, and when the man had served Haskell and Raven heaping helpings of
huevos rancheros
and strong black coffee and returned to his range, Raven draped her napkin on her lap and said, “Before we head out on the trail together, Agent Haskell, I think we'd better agree on some rules.”

“Rules?” Bear said, salting his food. “Agent York, you know how I feel about rules.”

“Well, don't worry,” she said around a mouthful of eggs, green chili, and beans. “There's only one.” She was the only woman he knew who could make chewing beans and eggs look erotic.

“Oh, well, in that case . . .”

“It is this: we are not sleeping together.” Raven arched her brows to study him, like a schoolmarm staring over her desk to make sure she'd been understood by the most dunderheaded boy in her class. She tossed her head, throwing her hair back, and continued to chew and stare at him over the table.

Haskell chuckled as he poked his fork into one of his four sunny-side-up eggs, the yolk bleeding into the refried beans and green chili liberal spiced with red chili peppers. “Oh, that's all.” He chuckled again and forked eggs and beans into his mouth, wagging his head as though she'd just told him she'd seen a green dog pass in the street.

She swallowed, frowned. “What do you mean, ‘that's all'?”

He said, “Agent York, you got nothin' to worry about.”

She studied him for a beat or two. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means just what I said. I got no intention of goin' to the same well twice.”

“The same well twice?”

Bear hiked a heavy shoulder. “Don't worry about it.”

Raven waited until she'd swallowed and sipped her coffee to say, “You mean that you see me as . . . some sort of
well
, Agent Haskell?”

“Look,” Haskell said, swallowing and casting her the same look she'd given him a minute before. “We got a sayin' down Texas way. Milk always tastes better from a different cow. OK? You get it now, Agent York? I ain't interested in pullin' your bloomers down again. Oh, maybe in a pinch. I mean, if we was to be on the trail for more than, say, four, five days . . .” He let his voice trail off and looked at her. “What is it?”

“You bastard.”

“Huh?”

Raven's perfect cheeks were mottled pink. “You are absolutely the most goatish human being I've ever met. Do you realize that?”

“Well, I reckon I do now.”

Bear chuckled again, trying to ignore the faint throbbing and tingling in his cock, and shoved another forkful of food into his mouth.

He said, “But at least you got nothin' to worry about. And wasn't that what had your pantaloons in a bunch? You were afraid I might tempt you, out there in that wide, open country between here and Spotted Horse, into doin' something against the boss's orders? Or into lettin' yourself succumb to ol' Bear's charms and maybe gettin' your head all fuzzy with thoughts of ol' Bear ruttin' around between your purty—”

“Stop this instant!” she hissed, glancing at the old man dining behind them. The sawbones or lawyer was absorbed in the newspaper spread open to one side of his breakfast platter.

Raven glared at Haskell, her delicate jaws hard, the slight cleft in her chin shadowed by the eatery's few smoking bracket lamps. “I know what you're trying to do, and it is not working. Oh, you're an absolute
devil
!”

Bear hung his jaw and carved deep lines across his sun-seasoned forehead. “Huh?”

Raven wagged her head and went back to work on her plate. She wasn't one of those delicate female eaters, like most young ladies with Raven's looks and uppity background. Agent York could dip her snoot in the trough as well as any dollar-a-day cowpuncher—she just looked a whole lot better doing it.

“I know what you're trying to do,” she said, smiling knowingly, blinking her cobalt eyes as with one hand she shoved a chunk of tortilla, eggs, beans, and chili between the ripe, pink lips that Haskell was trying not to think about kissing.

Haskell looked shocked. “What am I tryin' to do?”

“You know.”

“No, I don't know. Please tell me!”

“Hah!” She laughed. “You'd love that, wouldn't you?”

Haskell felt his heart thud in frustration. His cock was fairly dribbling in his longhandles, but he sure as hell was not going to let her know that. She might have been on to him—perhaps she was smarter, more cunning, than he'd given her credit for—but he was going to play his hand the best he could.

He placed a silent bet with himself that merely by ignoring her—which was the most powerful weapon a man could use against a vixen like Raven York—he'd have her moaning before the sun went down this evening.

And after it had set behind the Big Horns, his comely colleague would be sitting on his face and sucking his cock.

A
fter breakfast, they rented
horses from the Douglas Federated Livery and Feed Barn, scribbling out a single Pinkerton payment voucher in exchange for the mounts, and then stocked up on trail supplies from the Sullivan Mercantile. The sun was just breaking free of the eastern horizon when they rode out of town, meeting a ranch wagon clattering into the little settlement from the west.

Haskell straddled a buckskin, Raven a brown-and-white
pinto
pony that she'd picked out herself, impressing her colleague with her knowledge of horseflesh, although he didn't give her the satisfaction of mentioning it. She wouldn't have thought much of the compliment, anyway, as she was still in a snit over what he'd said at breakfast.

He couldn't help wondering, however, how she, having been raised by a rich family in a New York City mansion, had acquired her eye for western stock. He didn't consciously admit to himself that she was, for all her haughtiness and general arrogance, a rather impressive girl who seemed at a relatively young age—he believed she was only twenty-two—to have made herself at home on the rugged western frontier.

She'd not only made herself comfortable, but she even seemed to thrive on the adventure and danger of it all. He wondered what her family thought of her career, but he allowed the mystery to remain.

He didn't feel like making conversation with her this morning. He didn't like to make conversation with any girl who was giving him the cold shoulder, and that's what she did throughout the morning and well into the afternoon. She didn't utter more than ten words to him all day, and those ten only concerned practical matters such as the horses and their midday lunch, which they'd consumed with coffee boiled over a low fire beneath a scraggly cottonwood, in the shade of a low bluff.

The trail they followed nearly straight north of Douglas cleaved some of the loneliest, most forlorn country Haskell had ever visited. A panging barrenness had always weighed on him the several times he'd traversed this eastern Wyoming desert either on his way to or from Denver, on his sundry assignments during the years he'd worked for Pinkerton. The land was all low bluffs and slanting rimrocks, with long stretches between them of prickly-pear flats and occasional tufts of buckbrush and sage. Distant, thin lines of trees marked dry watercourses.