The storm had dropped the temperature, already cool at this altitude, a good fifteen degrees and gooseflesh rose on his arms and legs. He felt the fine hair prick across the back of his neck and his shoulders.
Still, looking down toward his crotch, he saw that the girl’s warming effect had drilled through the chill and, hearing footsteps on the stairs and women’s voices echoing around the cavernous halls, he stepped quickly into the tub and hunkered low, dropping his hand to hide the evidence of his automatic, carnal aspirations.
No sooner had his bare ass touched the tapered tub’s icy seat than the footpads in the hall were replaced by the click of the door latch. The door swung open, revealing the beguiling, alluring countenance of the dark-haired Ulalia. As she stepped into the room, crouching over the steaming wooden bucket she carried in both hands, another dark-haired girl flanking her, Cuno pressed his hands down tighter over his crotch, thrusting his shoulders forward and curling his toes with embarrassment.
Exposed to one woman was awkward enough. But two?
“Ready or not!” trilled Ulalia, laughing as she moved toward the tub, with the other woman—a round-bodied Indian with tobacco-dark skin and a pronounced limp—shuffling along behind her, dour-faced, eyes respectfully averted.
Ulalia walked around behind Cuno and grunted, laughing, as she lifted the bucket above his head. The steaming water hit his scalp and slithered down his face and back, spilling over his thighs and knees. The soothing contrast to the chill room and tub made him shiver and loose an involuntary howl drowned by a thunderclap that made the floor jump.
“That good, yes?” Ulalia laughed as she handed the empty bucket to the Indian and took the second one.
“Not bad,” Cuno said, sucking in a sharp breath as the second bucket was dumped over his head, swathing his body in the soothing, womb-like warmth. “Oooh, yeah. Not bad.”
“These,” she said, grabbing Cuno’s clothes off the chair and dropping the entire pile except for his hat and boots into the second empty bucket, “Lame Fawn will wash and dry before the fire.”
“Jeepers,” Cuno exclaimed, cupping the steaming water across his chest, “this is better service than you get at the Larimer Hotel in Denver!” He glanced at Ulalia ushering the Indian girl out the door. “Not that I know from firsthand experience, ya understand.”
The girl looked at him as she closed the door. “You’ve never been to Denver?”
“Oh, I’ve been to Denver. Never been to the
Larimer
.” Cuno continued splashing the water up over his shoulders and knees, chuckling now with the feeling of well-being in the unexpected presence of this charming foreign waif and the hot bath, energetic fiddle music leaping up through the floorboards to be drowned occasionally by another thunderclap. His problems were a hundred miles away, on the other side of the storm. “Doubt I ever will.”
“I was to Denver once,” Ulalia said, opening a drawer of the chest between the windows. “But only once . . . when we first came here from Russia. It was a dusty city, with the smells of the cows.” She wrinkled her nose as she moved to the tub, a cake of blue-speckled white soap in one hand, a stout scrub brush in the other. “But I heard the hotels and restaurants are wonderful!”
“Overrated. I swamped a few.” Cuno set his hand over the hand in which she held the soap. “But I’ll bet you’ll get back there and see for yourself someday.”
He tried to take the soap, but she moved her hand away and dipped the brush into the water beside his right thigh. “I wash your back.”
“You don’t have to . . .” Cuno let the sentence die on his lips and gave an audible groan as Ulalia ran the brush across his back, between his shoulder blades, where his muscles had grown taut as rawhide from tension and riding stooped in the driver’s box of the jail wagon. “Well, I reckon . . . if you insist . . .”
He leaned forward, letting his shoulders hang slack as the girl worked the brush over his back gently at first, in a swirling motion. When she’d worked up a heavy lather, she scrubbed harder, and he could see her buffeting hair in the periphery of his vision, hear her soft grunts and sighs as she worked.
“You come here to prospect the rocks?” she said, dipping the brush in the water once more and making him even more conscious of the erection he was trying to keep hidden between his thighs. “Some say the gold is pinched out, but Uncle doesn’t think so. As quickly as the others came and went, he thinks, after someone has followed another feeder creek to the mother lode, Petersburg will boom again.”
“Just passin’ through,” Cuno said, the girl’s question unfortunately reminding him of what he was doing here in the first place. “You know if this trail hooks up with the main one to Crow Feather—farther east, I mean?”
“You must ask my uncle. He goes to Crow Feather for supplies.” Ulalia rubbed the soap across the brush again, and kneeling behind him, leaned forward to run the brush down over his shoulder and begin slowly scrubbing his chest. Her long hair brushed against his ear. “The main trail over the passes is six miles west. It goes south.”
“Been through there,” Cuno said, tipping his head up to look into the girl’s pretty face. “I was lookin’ for a more scenic route.” He reached up and ran his thumb against her cheek. “I reckon I found it.”
As she ran the brush in long, slow strokes across his chest, her eyes dropped to the soapy water between his thighs. The corners of her mouth quirked up, and Cuno followed her gaze.
His red shaft jutted boldly, proudly, above the suds.
He sucked a sharp breath, dropped his hands down to cover himself once more, and closed his knees. “Uh . . . whoa. Now, that there is . . .”
Ulalia dropped the brush into the water and rose. “Why don’t you finish washing yourself?”
She walked away from the tub, and Cuno thought she was going to leave the room—possibly to hail her uncle and his shotgun—but then swerved off to a chair in the corner near the door. It was a high-backed, brocade chair beside an accordion privacy screen—cherrywood frames covered with black velvet in which large yellow moons and stars were stitched and over which several articles of women’s undergarments were draped.
Keeping her eyes on Cuno, who stared back at her skeptically, she slowly lifted one of her feet to the edge of the chair, peeled off the bright red slipper, and dropped it to the floor. Her eyes were round and smoky, and her lips were frozen in that same beguiling half smile.
When she’d removed the other slipper, she rose and stepped behind the screen, which covered her only chest high. She wrinkled the skin above her nose and looked at him from under her thin chestnut brows, between the flowing wings of her chestnut hair, with mock reproof. “You finish washing. No lingering.” She chuckled huskily. “I bring you towel.”
As the storm continued to pummel the saloon with rain and thunder, Cuno resumed scrubbing himself with the brush more vigorously than necessary, his blood boiling in his veins. He hadn’t been with a woman in many months, and his loins, he suddenly realized, were ready to burst.
Uncle Leo’s ominous threat had retreated to the far back shadows of his heated mind.
Partly concealed by the black velvet screen, holding Cuno’s heated gaze, the girl unbuttoned the front of her dress and leaned sideways to let if fall down one arm. She leaned the other way, and the dress fell down the other arm, leaving her creamy shoulders bare and accenting the pale length of her neck sheathed in the thick curls of her hair.
Her smile broadened, and she dropped her arms straight down in front of her. A moment later, they came up lifting a gauzy camisole. The lacy, white garment rose up over her face, taking her hair with it, and when she tossed it aside, her hair cascaded in a wonderfully messy mass about her cheeks and shoulders.
She stooped, her head and shoulders jerking this way and that as, obviously, she removed her stockings and other sundry unmentionables. Cuno had finished his hasty scrubbing by the time the girl turned away from the partition for a moment, grabbed something from down low by the back wall, then emerged wrapped in a thick, purple towel that covered her from the bottoms of her ripe breasts to the tops of her thighs.
As Ulalia strode toward him, holding the towel with one hand and grinning like the cat that ate the canary, Cuno bounded up out of the soapy water so quickly that he got his feet tangled and nearly fell. Ulalia laughed as, placing one hand on the edge of the tub, he righted himself and, no longer caring if she saw how engorged he was, straightened and regarded the half-naked girl boldly.
Her eyes flicked down to his crotch, and her cheeks turned rosy. As Cuno leaned toward her, reaching out with his big hands, the girl stepped back, chuckling softly. With the grace of a practiced dancer, she wheeled off to his left, peeling the towel from around her with one hand and holding it up to Cuno, still partly concealing herself with it as she twirled over to the bed.
In a blur of a single motion, she swept the covers back and scuttled beneath them, drawing them up to her chin as Cuno, drying himself quickly, stepped out of the tub and moved toward her. He was breathing hard, and there was a low scream of wanton lust in his ears, fairly drowning out the storm.
Umber lamplight and blue lightning flickered across the shadowy bed, illuminating the girl reclining on one side and regarding him impishly, biting her lower lip as she slid the covers down to her waist, revealing the two healthy, pink-tipped globes of her succulent breasts.
15
NAT AVERY DIDN’T like folks pulling on his ears.
It rubbed him the wrong way, made him more conscious of how big the damn things were—large as a man’s hand, some said, hanging off the sides of his long, horsy, red-haired head.
But the other gang members, especially Bo Creel, gave Avery’s earlobes a tug every chance they got. Creel got such a chance when, caught in the rainstorm not long after leaving Oldenberg and the rest of the gang on the main trail to Crow Feather, Nat Avery, Bo Creel himself, and the two others in the foursome, whom Oldenberg had sent to scout the trail to Petersburg, sought shelter from the wicked gale in a cave close to the road.
Avery had turned his back on the others for only a second to loosen the saddle cinch of his lineback dun, frightened by the crashing thunder and hail the size of gumdrops, when Creel slipped up behind him and gave both of Avery’s lobes a hard, painful jerk at the same time.
Adding insult to injury, Creel loosed two loud, mocking whoops—a poor but grating imitation of a train whistle— then stumbled back away from Avery’s swinging fists, laughing as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
The mockery grated Avery no end, and he wanted to pummel Bo Creel’s face till it looked like a pumpkin smashed by a heavy-wheeled ore dray. But before he could lay a lick on the big, cow-eyed son of a bitch, one of the other two men—Stan Kitchen—rushed in behind Avery and pinned his arms behind his back.
Then all three of his cohorts added more insult to injury by accusing Avery of being unable to take a joke!
It didn’t help that Avery, at five-five and a hundred and thirty pounds, was the smallest of the four. He was the smallest of Oldenberg’s entire gang, in fact. Quick as he was with his pistols, with his fists he was all bony, swinging knuckles, hoarse cries of blinding fury, and flying spit. Whenever he retaliated—which was most of the time—he ended up on his back or with his arms twisted painfully behind him.
Avery tended his seething anger in brooding silence while he and the others waited out the storm in the cave, sipping coffee around a smoky fire, with the horses stomping and blowing in the shadows behind them. When an especially loud thunderclap rocked the cave, one or all four of the horses would loose an echoing whinny that pricked the hair on the back of his neck, and twanged his fury-frayed nerves.
After nearly an hour and a half of the pounding, earth-shaking torrent, the rain petered out and the sky began to lighten like a second dawn. Bruce Callaghan tossed his coffee dregs on the fire, ran a greasy sleeve across his thin brown mustache, and heaved his heavy bulk to his feet. “Well, looks like it’s clearin’, fellers. Let’s get a move on. That jail wagon’s gotta be holed up somewheres near.”
They’d become certain they were close behind the jail wagon not long after branching off on the trail to Petersburg, as the furrows and shoe marks they were following matched those that had scored the main trail to Crow Feather.
“Come on, Avery—grab your horse,” said Bo Creel, nudging the little, horse-faced, big-eared man with an elbow. “Less’n you wanna stay here and sulk like a school-girl.”
Snarling, Avery tossed the last of his coffee into the fire. He shoved his cup into his saddlebags, then stalked off into the shadows with the snickering others to retrieve his still-jittery mount.
Though his ears had long since recovered from Creel’s assault, humiliation and anger continued to gnaw Nat Avery’s gut and make the back of his eyes ache, as though mice were nipping at them, while he rode with the others along the muddy trail toward Petersburg.
The horses clomped wetly along the trace. Birds chattered in the pines and aspens, the stream gushed in its narrow bank, and a rain-fresh breeze wafted, tanged with wet sage and pine.
A mile out from the cave, Callaghan, riding point with Stan Kitchen—an Ozark Mountains-trained cold-steel artist and the fastest draw in the entire gang—stopped his big Appaloosa and raised his gloved hand. Avery checked his own mount down beside Creel.
“Yessir,” Callaghan said, scrutinizing the ground beneath his horse. “That wagon came through here short time ago. Not even the rain and hail scoured those wide, deep tracks from the trail.”
“He’s holed up in Petersburg,” Stan Kitchen said, rolling a three-for-a-nickel cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other. “I’d bet my left nut on it.”
“Of course he’s holed up in Petersburg,” Bo Creel said, shifting around in his saddle. “He’ll be holed up there a good long time. And if he’s still headed fer Crow Feather, he’ll either have to backtrack or head cross-country. Them creeks’ll be broiling up around the tops of their cutbanks till nigh on nightfall.”