Longarm and the Wolf Women (13 page)

Three large, gutted jackrabbits hung down from the saddlehorn before her—the fur bloody, eyes open.

The dark-haired girl turned toward Natcho and the others and halted the horse. The blonde followed her gaze, lips stretching back from her teeth in a grin.

The dark-haired girl smiled smokily, keeping her lips pressed together. She clucked the horse forward, continuing up canyon, hers and the blonde's rich hair jostling down their backs.

“Are my balls so sore I'm hallucinatin'?” asked Wilbur Keats.

“If you're seein' a couple purty women on a paint horse,” said Crazy Eddie, “then I reckon we're
both
hallucinatin'.”

“You boys wait here,” Natcho said, reining his pinto after the girls. “Neither one of you is in any condition for romance.”

“Shit, you're sayin' your hand don't hurt?” Crazy Eddie chuffed.

“A wounded hand doesn't put a Mexican out of the mood for love, Eduardo.”

“Wait up, Natcho,” Wilbur called. “I think my oysters are beginnin' to regain their natural size and color.”

“My nose just started feelin' better, too,” said Eddie, booting his white-socked dun after Natcho.

When the Mexican was about ten yards behind the girls trotting their paint up canyon under a canopy of darkening aspen leaves, the blonde looked back, grinning.

“Whoa, there, señoritas!”

The dark-haired girl turned toward him coolly while the blonde continued smiling at him over her right shoulder. The girl holding the reins checked the horse down and neck-reined it toward Natcho. The Mexican reined his own horse to a halt and poked his hat back off his forehead as he ran his eyes over the two incredible creatures before him, a hard ball forming in his throat.

Both were clothed in what looked like deerskin rags—if you could call it clothed. One strap of the blonde's dress hung down to her right elbow, revealing all but the nipple of a hard, round breast, golden from where the sun had tanned it. Her dress was edged with rabbit furs and trimmed with talismans in the form of bear teeth and died porcupine quils and racoon claws shaped like the sun and moon.

The dark-haired girl's dress was similar but simpler, and instead of talismans adorning it, she wore a necklace of white trade beads and bear teeth around her long, regal, adobe-colored neck.

While the blonde's hair hung around her head in deliciously messy curls streaked with trail dust and seeds, the dark girl's coal black hair hung straight down her back, glistening with bear tallow and trimmed with a faint spray of Indian paintbrush. Her breasts, too, were full and round, the low-cut dress exposing the deep cleft between.

The girls' legs were exposed from their knees down, the long calves muscular and smooth. Both were barefoot, their feet dusty.

He smelled a gamey musk emanating from them both.

The blonde, her blue eyes sparkling, stared at him while speaking to the girl in front of her. “He has a question for us!”

Natcho had been about to ask them about the Ute healing woman, but their beauty was like a direct blow from an axe handle. He chuckled as the other two men rode up behind him, their horses blowing, their silence revealing how deep down their throats their tongues had slipped, awestruck by the girls' beauty.

“Yes, ma'am,” Natcho said, removing his hat with a flourish then holding it across his heart, “I was just wondering to what blessing of fate do my
compañeros
and I owe the honor of sharing the same trail as such a beautiful pair of señoritas.”

“What's he jawin' about, Raven?” asked the blonde, wrinkling the bridge of her nose as she stared at Natcho. “I didn't understand a
word.
”

“I think we have been complimented, Sunflower.” For the first time, the dark-haired girl called Raven smiled, her perfectly sculpted cheeks dimpling. “I think we are being what the white-eyes call
courted.
”

“Courted?” Sunflower laughed throatily. “Does that mean they want to
fuck
us?”

Natcho's face warmed. The blonde laughed again, harsher than before. Raven's smile grew, her almond-shaped, black eyes slitting alluringly.

“Christalmighty!” whooped Crazy Eddie, his smashed nose making it sound more like a bull elk's raspy bugle. “Sunflower and
Raven
!”

“Only if the, uh . . . fucking so delights you, of course,” Natcho said, bowing his head slightly at the women, the corners of his mouth drawing up.

Sunflower giggled. It was the same giggle they'd heard through the trees.

Raven shunted her dark gaze around the three men before her. “If you are looking for the healer, she and her man pulled foot a month ago.”

“Afraid of the . . . what was it?” Natcho glanced at the abandoned cabin behind him. “Wolf women?”

“
Sí
,” said Raven, eyes sparkling with pride in her Spanish.

“And the crazy mountain man they run with,” said Sunflower, leaning forward and speaking in a loud whisper, as if sharing a secret. “Pure-dee kill-crazy, we hear.” She winked.

“Ugly creatures, too, I bet,” said Wilbur Keats, finally finding his tongue. “Prob'ly an old prospector's tale!”

“Of course,” said Raven. She returned her gaze to Natcho. “Follow us, if you wish, and we'll tend your wounds.”

She threw her hair back and gigged the paint forward. “It just so happens we are spending the evening alone.” She flashed a devilish smile over her right shoulder. “And we are lonely!”

Both girls laughed like witches . . . beautiful, beguiling witches.

Natcho stared after them, heart pounding, his loins heavy. He glanced at the two men behind him. Both Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats looked as though they'd been struck by lightning as they stared after the girls.

“What the fuck are we waiting for, amigos?”

Natcho ground his spurs into the pinto's flanks.

 
The girls set a harried pace as they rode up canyon a good mile then turned right off the trail and headed into a broad, off-shooting ravine.

Several times Natcho lost sight of them as they galloped through rolling, broken country. They were even harder to keep pace with once the sun went down.

Natcho stopped his horse a couple of times to listen for their hoofbeats.

He wasn't sure where in the hell they were. Wariness was beginning to prick at him, when a pale, triangular object came into view about thirty yards ahead, at the base of a high, rock wall, just beyond a starlit, murmuring stream. The two girls and the paint horse were swaying and dodging silhouettes in front of it.

A teepee, Natcho saw as he crossed the stream and drew rein before the girls' blowing horse. There was a large fire ring before the teepee. From a high, stout branch of a nearby cottonwood, a large, hide-wrapped bundle hung fifteen feet off the ground. Probably a grub cache out of the reach of coons and bears.

Natcho kept his hand on his revolver's grips as he looked around, Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats reining up on either side of him, men and horses breathing hard from the cross-country run through the darkness.

“I thought for sure my horse was gonna break a leg!” Keats said, wiping sweat from his face.

“I ain't so sure about this,” said Crazy Eddie. He, too, had his hand on his pistol. “How do we know these two ain't . . .” He let his voice trail off as he looked around the bivouac and the creek.

“Wolf women?” said Natcho, teeth showing against his dark face in the darkness. “Do they look like wolves to you?”

Raven walked toward them as Sunflower began leading the paint into the trees left of the teepee. Raven threw an arm out to indicate a pile of wood beside the fire ring. “You men build a fire. Sunflower and I will provide food and medicine. You may spread your bedrolls out around the fire. You can stay here this evening.”

“You can stay
here
this evening!” laughed Sunflower as she and the horse disappeared in the darkness. “Build a big fire,” she called above the sound of crunching weeds and branches. “I like
big fires
!”

“No menfolk about?” Crazy Eddie asked from atop his dun.

“Our . . . men are up canyon,” said Raven, turning and striding toward the teepee.

“Prospectors or hunters?” asked Natcho. It was damn odd for men to leave women—especially a pair as beautiful as these—alone out here. But maybe that's why they left them in such an isolated place. Besides, in spite of their obvious femininity, these two looked capable of taking care of themselves.

“What do you think, Natcho?” said Keats, sitting his saddle to Natcho's left.

Natcho remembered the womanly curves he'd spied beneath the torn, dirty dresses, the full breasts fairly spilling from the deer hide. They'd smelled like something wild.

Blood pounded in his loins.

His ears rang at the prospect of sharing a bedroll with either one.

“Stake the horses, Wilbur,” he said as he swung down from the saddle. “Me and Eddie will get started on that
big
fire!”

While Crazy Eddie stripped and staked the horses by the creek, Natcho and Wilbur Keats built a fire large enough to roast a sow.

Meanwhile, Sunflower went to work skinning the field-dressed rabbits with the quick assuredness of a practiced hunter, her breasts swinging back and forth behind her dress as she worked, grunting and slicing with her skinning knife.

She didn't seem to mind the blood splashing her torn, smoke-stained dress and her hair. Her neck and the top third of her tits glistened gold in the firelight, offering Natcho and Keats a balm for their cuts and bruises as they spread out their saddles and blanket rolls a short distance from the crackling flames.

The nights got cold at this altitude, even in summer, but the large fire precluded the need for coats.

Crazy Eddie walked over from the creek, and Natcho broke out a fresh whiskey bottle. They passed around the bottle while Sunflower spitted the rabbits and Raven, who'd been rustling around inside the teepee, stepped out and moved toward Natcho.

The black-haired girl had thrown a gray fox skin around her shoulders. In one hand she carried a bowl reeking like kerosene, juniper, rose hips, and something else that could only be horse piss. In her other hand she carried a wad of burlap.

“Here comes Doctor Raven!” giggled Sunflower as she poked the last spit through the last quartered rabbit and set it far enough out from the fire that the meat would cook without charring.

Raven knelt beside Natcho. He smiled up at her, staring at her black eyes glistening with firelight as she dipped one of the burlap strips into the lumpy goo in the bowl. She removed the neckerchief from around Natcho's hand, tossed it into the fire, then lowered her head to inspect the hand closely.

Having her this close to him, touching him, gave him an instant hard-on.

The bullet hadn't broken any bones, but it had torn out a good bit of flesh between Natcho's right index finger and thumb. Since he was mildly intoxicated by the women and the whiskey, it looked worse than it felt.

“Not so bad,” Raven said.

As she wrapped the poultice around his hand, Natcho stared at her breasts framed in ragged fox skin. They jounced as she worked. When she'd tied the burlap tightly around the wound, she gazed down at him, her eyes straying to his bulging crotch.

The corners of her mouth rising slightly, she raised his hand to her left breast. With his index finger, she traced a circle around the nipple pushing at the deerskin dress from behind. It felt like a small thimble at the end of the swollen globe.

“Does that feel better?” she asked huskily, her hair hanging down both sides of her regal face.

Natcho chuckled. He stretched out his fingers to engulf the entire breast in his hand. She rose slowly, the breast rising beyond his reach, her gaze holding his until she turned and moved to the other side of the fire, where Eddie reclined against his saddle.

Natcho's jaws tightened. He glanced to his left, where Wilbur Keats sat on a log, elbows on his knees, regarding Natcho with a mocking grin. Natcho cursed under his breath.

Sunflower was dancing between the teepee and the fire, trying to catch glowing cinders in her hands as though they were snowflakes, her short skirt leaping about her long, bare legs, curly blond hair dancing on her shoulders. Her body seemed to move in several directions at once.

On the other side of the fire, Raven knelt beside Crazy Eddie, who'd been watching Sunflower, awe-struck, his blue black nose and swollen eyes resembling the exaggerated cutout features in a Halloween pumpkin.

Now he turned to Raven. Eddie was holding the whiskey bottle. She pointed at it.

“Take a big drink,” she said, spreading her hands to indicate “big.”

He stared up at her, lower jaw still hanging, eyes puzzled.

“I'm going to set your nose,” Raven explained.

Crazy Eddie smiled, a ghoulish expression on his battered face. “I think it's just cracked. It'll heal just fine. I done broke it before.”

Raven took the bottle from Eddie's hand and lifted it to her own lips. She took a couple of long swallows, throwing her head far back on her shoulders. As she lowered the bottle, her lips made a hollow smack as they left the glass. She ran her hand across her mouth and thrust the bottle back at Eddie.

“Take a drink.”

Eddie hesitated. He lifted the bottle slowly, took a pull. When he lowered it, his battered eyes looked skeptical.

Raven moved toward him, planted her left knee on his chest.

“Hey, hey . . . wait, now—!”